The Shape of His Heart
by Gabi-hime
Summary: Everybody's got a story. This one has poker, pudding, Ashura, Leviathan, and Perry Mason. Top that. Auron x Rikku, aurikku.
1. Prologue: Gimme the Odds

Everyone, everywhere in the world has a story to be told. Whether or not you think their story is important or interesting or even worth listening to at all, it's their story and no one else's and no one can ever take that away from them. Whether it's a good story, or an interesting story, or even a story with a moral -- well, that's up to them, and when all the cards are down, I don't think anyone has any room to point any fingers. We all play the hands we're given the best we can and stagger through our stories the best we can, like blind fish in the dark.

Of course, now he'd say that fish don't stagger and what does it matter if a blind fish is in the dark, it can't see anyway, even if it were broad daylight -- and well no, he wouldn't say that exactly, but he'd be thinking it and it'd be as plain as those little wire rimmed glasses he wears on his nose. You know, I don't think he needs those at all. I think he wears them for the same reason he wears that giant red overcoat -- because he thinks it looks _cool_. Which I guess is fine and dandy with me. I always did like red.

Anyway.

This is _my _story.

Damn. I've always wanted to say that.

This is my story and it's about poker and music and memories and living and dandelions and finding joy in every day, no matter what, and it's about one man so bent up inside he may as well have been a paper clip that someone took all the time to straighten out and then laid it on the floor and tap danced on like it was amateur night at the Luca Amphitheater. And it has action and adventure and copious amounts of illegal activities, like theft. But only if you think it's wrong to steal from fiends. I mean, what do they need it for anyway? Not like they can use the gil at bingo night in Bevelle or something -- Oh. And it's a story about me.

My name is Rikku, and I just don't think I'll ever win at five card stud.

. . . but then, _maybe _I did. Maybe we all did. Maybe in the end it's all bluffing, no matter what you've got in your hands, and maybe that's not so bad.

This is my story, and I'm only here to tell it.

. . . and I was serious about the poker.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabi-hime )**

**Prologue: Gimme the Odds**

"Maybe you should quit while you're ahead," he advised thoughtfully from where he sat in the window seat, legs dangling idly, his head leaned against the icy glass so it made a little spot of warm, muffy mist against the sharp edges of the frost. His mug of spiced cider was still steaming slightly as he nursed it, paying close attention to the table in front of me. Well, really he was paying close attention to the _cards _and not the table -- not even _we _could spend our time getting kicks from staring at the whorls in table oak -- no matter _what _Lulu says.

"To be able to quit while I'm ahead I totally have to _be _ahead first," I explained as I rolled my eyes back into my head. I could roll them so far back in my head it almost looked like I was having a seizure or speaking in tongues like a Yevonite with a snake in her pants. I'd practiced it in front of the mirror so many times as a kid that Brother used to tell me I'd crack the glass with my face. It always drives grown-ups and fuddy-duddies nuts -- like eye rolling always does -- and the zigzag holey abyss of my eyes seems to turn in on itself, like water going down the drain the wrong way. It's almost hypnotic when I see it in the mirror sometimes. It's always been like having my own secret eyebeams. Of sarcasm. It's awesome, no matter how much Pops complained about it -- _Rikku, you roll your eyes at me one more time and I'm gonna slap you so hard they won't stop rolling until next June_. Of course, Lulu says I roll my eyes too much. Trust her to be on the same side as Pops. Still, I bet if she'd had personal hypno-swirlies of mind control in her face, then she'd totally use them too. Of course, she kind of had personal hypno-swirlies of mind control on her chest, but it was really hard to say _Lulu, you -have breasts- too much._

"Well, more than 'ahead' I meant 'quit while you're less behind that you will be five seconds from now.' That's _kind of _ahead," he offered helpfully, swinging his legs out of sync with one another so they thudded dully against the upholstered seat. Yeah, thanks Tidus. Big help. I'll be sure to call you next time I need expert poker advice.

"Kind of ahead like you're kind of a dope," I retorted, sticking my tongue out over my shoulder. What did he know? I was doing fine. I mean, I was sort of losing, but, well, not really. Not permanently. No way. I'm good at cards. Mostly. I always beat Brother at crazy eights. Never once lost. Ever. Stud poker is sort of like crazy eights because they both use cards and -- wait, okay, back up and strike that. Crazy eights isn't much like poker at all. But still, nine tenths of winning is _believing _that you'll win and by this point in the evening, that remaining one tenth had given me such a hard time that I was concentrating my brains out believing in _me _and the five cards spread out on the lacquered wood.

At the same time I was kind of _anti_-believing in his cards.

And really, there was no way Mister Says Less Than A Mime in a Garden Full of Penguins could keep up his winning streak. There was no way. It was the law of averages. Eventually the coin was going to come up tails and I'd win a hand, unless he's been scarfing luck spheres when no one's looking. And then I'd get to breaking him apart and winning back all my money and gear from there. _Ajano zuinhao cdyndc fedr dra vencd cdab, yht ajano tyo pakehc fedr dra vencd nyo uv mekrd. _I hunkered down over my cards and stared daggers into their shiny matte backs. Zanarkand wasn't built in a day, but it could be won in one.

Or, you know, _lost _in one. Of course, that never occurred to me at the time. Maybe that's my problem.

"You know," he said softly, taking an easy drink from his saucer -- and from this point you should know that this is a different 'he' than More Blonde Than Usual who only ever talks softly when he's whispering to me about abducting Yunie and taking her to a fun fair or something, "It doesn't matter how long you stare. You aren't going to be able to see through to the suits on the other side."

You know, in retrospect I don't think Auron should be allowed to play poker. It's just not fair because he can make your spine shiver whenever he says a _word_. It doesn't even matter what word. It could be 'plumber,' or 'gargle,' or 'hosiery,' or even 'pumpernickel.' Just the way he says it, soft and so low it's probably on a different tonal register or something. I'm not president of the Auron fanclub or anything, I'm just being honest the way a girl has to be to know the field she's playing. In a way it was as much of an unfair advantage as that whole -having breasts- thing that Lulu had going for her. Cast scan on Auron and one of his skills will totally be listed as _supple voice._ It's right after Mental Break. Now that's something you don't want to be on the wrong end of.

"You have some place else to be?" I asked flippantly, waving my arms once before gesturing in the direction of the window seat where Tidus still sat, watching us play, or you know, watching me stall, "I dunno if you forgot or something, but there's a blizzard outside."

I didn't really expect an answer, but of course he gave me one.

"Bed," he said laconically, his good eye half sloped shut as if he were dozing already, one arm still tucked into the folds of his gi, slung like it was broken -- or like he had so little to worry from me and my hand that he didn't even _need _to turn over his cards. Talk about over-confidence, either that or he _has _been scarfing luck spheres. The other arm dangled over the back of his chair indolently, like a marker on the sizable buildup of gil at his feet from whenever he cleared his winnings from the table. Currently he had all my gil, three high potions, a phoenix pinion, my Celestial Targe and -- here's the really embarrassing part -- perched on top of the pile like an egg in a nest was Deus Ex Machina. Really, I just didn't know when to quit -- Pops always said so -- but then Silverado here _could _have been a gentleman about it. What was he going to do with my Targe anyway, wear it as a fashionable hat?

But, I had lost it, fair and square, so it was his to keep, fair and square. For now. For just until I won it all back from him and maybe took the muramasa besides. Wouldn't I look cute hauling around a sword as big as I am and playing rebel samurai? _You have dishonored my temple! Now we must fight!_ Maybe with a little help from Tidus I could even learn to tap it over my shoulder in that slow, bored way that Unnaturally Crimson did when he was thinking about something. Yeah, maybe in a hundred thousand years after I've absorbed fifty jillion more strength spheres. Who wanted a great big enormous nihontou anyway? Not me. No way. Never. I just wanted my Targe back. And my claws. I'd have to win them back before this blizzard blizzed itself out or jeeze, I'd have to dig through my pack and hope I'd kept a second rate pair around and not traded them for fruity mixed drinks or twelve consecutive shoopuf rides.

"Aren't you just Captain Fun and Entertainment."

"I am a simple man with simple tastes, Rikku," there it was again -- _supple voice._ I'd say he was doing it on purpose to distract me or something, but he _always _talks like that, "Ante."

I sighed, digging my toes into the rug, "We shoulda stayed with draw poker. It's more fun."

"If you will recall, we switched from draw poker to stud poker because you kept palming cards," said the _long _suffering. He should really change his name to Auron - Martyr of the People. I dunno. Maybe he deserves it for putting up with me _and _Tidus for about a jillion hours of our lives. It can't really be what he thinks of as a good time no matter how self-satisfied he looks. He probably likes reading really boring books about dead guys or bushido or the history of sake or something. Anyway, coming in at number one on the 'Ways Auron Wants To Spend a Quiet Evening at Lake Macalania' Hit Parade is so not going to be playing poker with the local genius beauty Al Bhed spokesgirl. Yeah, I dunno what's wrong with him either. I mean, I'd sign up for that three times in a row.

"I wasn't palming cards!" I cried indignantly, slapping the table because this seemed like the thing to do to make myself seem more credible. I had been, sort of. Yeah. Okay. I was totally palming cards, but a girl has to take stock of her _own _special advantages. I mean, he was using _supple voice_, so by all rights, Rikku, -thief extraordinare- had to at least _try _to palm a few cards, "Some of them just fell into the top of my shorts and I was trying to get them out."

"Three aces just _happened _to fall into your shorts?" he asked drily, taking another slow sip. He always carried his own brew around with him. I should really try it some time. Hey! Maybe I could win that off of him. I can totally see me using a jug of alcohol way more than a big honking sword. Of course, to win it off of him I had to actually _start winning._ Details, details. Pops always said, '_Ed'c dra meddma drehkc dryd kad oui.'_ Details and the devil and all that.

"How did you know they were aces anyway? They could have been twos or something."

"I was watching you the entire time," he laid the gloved hand that he'd been dangling over the back of his chair on the table by his cards and it settled like a bird coming to rest -- really kind of pretty to watch. Or it would've been, if he hadn't been beating the pants off of me at poker at the time. Smug bastard. He had to be enjoying this. I know _I'd_ be enjoying this. Well, I wasn't going down without a fight. _Hajan keja ib._ Pops _always _said I didn't know when to quit.

"Wow, Tidus, Auron's been staring at my shorts this entire time! Did you know he was such a big old pervo?"

"No, but somehow I am not surprised. He did hang out with my old man a lot, and my old man was a huge pervert. But then, maybe he wouldn't stare at your shorts if you didn't keep trying to stuff cards into them."

Yeah, again, thanks Tidus. Way thanks for all your help. Except not.

Entirely nonplussed, Auron issued his ultimatum, "Ante. If you are unable to ante, then we will call this a night."

Obviously my clever stalling wasn't working too well. I stared down at my cards. I had a good hand. Honestly, I had a _really _good hand. I had the queen of spades and the queen of diamonds showing, and I knew that the queen of clubs was my second card in the hole. I knew because it has a particular nick in the top of it from where it got stuck on something. Maybe my belt buckle last time I was trying to palm it into my pants -- not that I resorted to palming all the time or anything. Just when it's necessary. You know, after I've bet and lost _all my gear and money._ But then, Lady Luck was smiling on me this time. I had three queens. Auron only had a pair of deuces. Even if you don't know jack about poker, you should know that three queens way beat a pair of deuces. I had this hand in the bag. But -- and here was the kicker -- I could only play if I had something to bet. If I couldn't ante, then Tall, Dark, and Unconcerned was just going to shovel all my stuff into his bag and then go and get some beauty rest. It was just something my pride couldn't take. Especially if he gave me back Deus Ex Machina and my targe in the morning. It's the _principle _of the thing. I didn't want him to _give _them back. I wanted to _win _them back.

And besides, maybe I'd get some of whatever he keeps in that jug of his. People just assume it's sake. Maybe it's like, Bevelle Old Stout or something. Or you know, milk. Maybe behemoth milk.

Bottom line, I had to ante. And I didn't really have anything left to ante.

"Uh, I bet," I let my eyes roll around the room like I was still playing I Spy with Brother when we were kids. _I spy with my little eye, something that is . . . yellow! That's just sand again, dorkas. Pick something else. Rumt ouin duhkia, Rikku. I cannot spy -anything- else._ That was Home for you, nothing but sand and arrogance and togetherness and machina and sweat and work and a place to have birthdays and -- but, I didn't wanna think about that right now, couldn't afford to with Mister Samurai Showdown staring at me over his glasses like I was a bug in a jar. Clearly, he did not think I could ante and was counting on this. I had to find something to bet and fast. Finally, my eye fell on Tidus. The second he saw me settle, his eyes widened and he brought his hands up in defense, but I got it out before he could, "I bet Tidus's blitzball!"

"Hey, you _can't _bet my ball!" he cried indignantly, "You already lost all your stuff. I don't want you to start losing mine too! If I want to lose all my crap to Auron in poker, then I at least want to get to play him myself."

"You don't even know _how _to play," I argued, but as he did not seem convinced, I changed tactics, "I only need it for this _one hand_. Come on. Help a girl out when she's down! That's what friends are for, right Tidus? Right? Don't be a stuffed butt guado. It won't hurt you, right, to loan me your ball for five seconds? Of course it won't. Come on," I wheedled, squirming unhappily in my seat. I really had no idea what I was going to do if he didn't loan me his blitzball -- well, I had _one _last resort, but I really didn't want to have to fall back on it, since it's way _way _embarrassing.

Tidus crossed his arms, and got all stubborn sulky, "No way. I don't trust you. If I loan you my ball, I don't think I'll ever see it again."

"Oh, I'm sure I'd let you _see _it from time to time," said Auron calmly, rattling his gloved fingertips against the grain of the oak once, to punctuate.

"See? I told you. No way, Rikku. No dice. No deal," Tidus shook his head emphatically, like it was a sure bet that I was going to lose his ball to Ol' Geriatric. I crossed my own arms and slouched down in my chair sulkily. Oh ye of little faith.

"Gee thanks there, Auron. You were really a big help."

He chuckled once, smoky like peat or like butter in whiskey -- and you know, now that I think about it, butter in whiskey would probably be _way _gross, "The pleasure is all mine."

That smug bastard. He _was _enjoying this.

"Ante," he repeated like a broken record, "If you are unable to ante, then the game is over."

Second verse, same as the first. I had heard him fine the first time. He was just rubbing it in. Sadistic old fart. He had me right where he wanted me. It was my first really winning hand of the night, and he was as safe as sand in the desert. He _knew _I had a good hand and couldn't do jack about it. He was going to win _by proxy_, and _that _I just could not stand.

He started to sweep the remaining gil from the table placidly, quite sure I had nothing else to pull, but then I slammed my fist down so hard it really kind of hurt my hand, but I didn't want to ruin my moment so I thought about Kimahri chasing butterflies instead, "Hold it right there, buster."

Obviously, Sir Auron, bosshog guardian of Spira and one of the three who'd brought the Calm was not used to being called 'buster,' even when he was unfairly beating the living daylights out of someone at poker. _Supple voice_. He should have been disqualified from the start.

But then, I just never know when to quit.

"I'll ante," I said, nodding smartly. Now it was all or nothing. I was gonna to win here and win big, but you can't collect on the good stuff unless you're willing to take a few risks to get it. Nobody can accuse me of being a scaredy cat. I mean, lightning excepted. It's just _not playing fair _to pull lightning on a girl. Lightning aside, I'm not afraid of laying it on the line when the time comes.

He leaned half-interested over the table and propped his chin on his gloved hand, "Oh?" he asked idly, as if this were not an unpredictable development and he might possibly be able to fit my ante in between relaxed sips of alcohol and those self satisfied grunts he invariably replied to all questions with.

"I will!" I nodded again, slapping the table for emphasis.

"Then ante."

Clearly he was _still _not concerned. He was underestimating Rikku's ability to pull rabbits out of her hat. Obviously. Heck on rabbits. I can pull _chocobos_. I can pull _shoopufs_.

"I'll wager," I took a deep breath. There was no going back now, so I had to be sure of the hand I was playing. Three queens beat two deuces. I was golden. It was golden. I was going to stick it to him once and for all. There was nothing to worry about. I laid it on the line, "My right leg."

He had been taking a relaxed sip from his saucer when I'd made my declaration, and he must have snorted some into his nose or swallowed some the wrong way because be sputtered and coughed, spraying a fine mist of sake all over me, all over the cards, and certainly all over the table. Ha! At least I'd gotten a reaction this time. The look on his face that I caught there for a moment was priceless. He was honestly _confounded_. Like he had _no idea _how to react. Ah, victory is sweet. Somewhere behind me I heard Tidus hooting like this was the funniest thing he'd seen all year. Yeah, it probably was. I mean, Auron speechless _has _to beat out Wakka in drag.

Thank you. And for my next trick, I will make Seymour Guado disappear right in front of everyone's eyes! Just one good Supernova and then Yunie could dance her fanny off sending him.

Of course, that staggered look didn't hang around on his face for long. He tidied it away to the same place he puts all of his other expressions that don't seem to fit the caption " . . . " or "Interesting" or any other one word definitive pronouncements on the state of the world, and then raised a careful eyebrow.

"What would I want with your leg?"

I braced both my hands on my hips, "Hey!" I cried indignantly, "It's a good leg!"

"It is a good leg," I heard Tidus agreeing honestly behind me, "You can't deny that. She stays in good shape."

Well, it was nice to have him in my corner again. I guess he was excited because I hadn't bet _his _leg or something. I guess any kind of assurance is better than nothing. _Cammehk ouin haekrpun'c lrelgah ec paddan dryh cammehk ouin ufh._ It figures.

"It's a _great _leg!" I amended, hands still on my hips.

"But why would I _want _it?" he repeated slowly, as if he were trying very patiently to get a very obvious point across to a pair of brain addled nursery school kids. Well, maybe Tidus. Not me. I'm third grade _at least._

"Why _wouldn't _you want it?" asked Tidus incredulously, in that same 'teaching a one legged chocobo how to dance' voice, then he paused and seemed to consider something, "Hey, you know, I've always _wondered _about you and my old man -- "

Auron sighed audibly -- the kind of disgruntled sigh that you sometimes hear coming out of old tired nanny goats -- and turned the attention of his one dark eye very pointedly at me, "I'll wager four hundred gil against your leg."

"My leg is worth more than four hundred gil!" I swung it up on the table in an attempt to get my point across, my bare heel flush with his hand of cards. I mean, there was no reason to be insulting. It was worth seven hundred _at least_. Maybe more with my shoe and my sock included, but I hadn't thrown those into the bargain. I pointed first at my kneecap and then at my nicely muscled calf, and finally at my dainty little ankle. I may not -have breasts- like Lulu, but everybody's got _something _they're a little proud of. I guess you could say I'm kind of cute. You know, if you're into sticky little Al Bhed girls.

"Fine. A thousand gil against your right leg."

Hey, maybe sticky little Al Bhed girls were one of Auron's kinks. I guess you never can tell by looking. Then again, maybe it was just that he thought my feet smelled and was offering me a thousand gil to get them away from him. I swung my leg off the table again and sat on it, like this would keep him from taking it if I lost.

Ha. _If _I lost. Not very likely.

"Done."

"Now declare."

I did, flipping my cards over expertly with pert little fingers and there they were, my three little queens, pretty as princesses all in a row. They beat Old Cold Fish Smugness and his pair of deuces so far into the ground that they might actually flower in spring next year. It was a good feeling, victory. It was a good feeling that warmed your heart cockles so you curled your toes in the rug in happiness because damn, hadn't you just _shown him_. It was a good feeling for about two seconds.

Yeah, my queens beat the stuffing out of his pair of deuces. Too bad his deuces had brought their brothers, and even if you're really bad at math, you should know that three queens can't stand against four of a kind.

He just chuckled again, slow and easy, and then he took another drink.

Pops was right. I just don't know _when _to quit.

---------------

Silk and sows ears everybody. I started writing this on a bet, but man, I'm just totally taken with it now XD. Yeah, it does have an extended plot, so stay tuned. Very Auron/Rikku, but I'm not retarded, I promise.

Anyway, there it was. I hope you like it, and as always, reviews are welcome.

Love,

Gabs


	2. Chapter One: Follow the Queen

I've always been lucky. Now hold up one second. I know for sure from the previous events I have just related that you're thinking 'No way. She's as lucky as a tonberry who ate a black cat for breakfast and then washed it down with some broken mirror shards,' but I swear, outside of card games with Auron I'm usually so hot that you need a welding mask just to look at me. In the end, being lucky is kind of a required skill for a little girl with sticky fingers and a tendency to swipe spare change, ignition keys, and pass codes from her dad before she could toddle properly. Being lucky doesn't mean you _never _get caught, -- everybody gets caught sometimes; law of averages again -- it just means you get caught _less often_. Fewer hidings is more than enough incentive to get luck working for her over time.

But Pops always did say that you pay for everything you get, one way or another. Maybe Auron is just the way I have to pay for all the good luck I have everywhere else, like some kind of weird stoic leveling hand of justice. Maybe he kicked me right out of luckiness heaven and straight into luckiness purgatory. I bet Wakka would've eaten that up with a spoon a few months ago -- _You see? Yevon's makin' sure you don't get nothing for free, ya? You got to -atone.-_ Really, he seems to like penance and punishment a little too much, if you get my meaning. It makes me wonder if all those belts Lulu wears are just for show.

Well, since my horrible luck against Auron was what had gotten me into this mess in the first place, I thought it was a dandy solution to let it try and get me out of it. I know what you're thinking, 'Don't cross the streams, Rikku! You've already lost one leg to Auron, what else do you want to lose?' but I'm not crazy enough to keep beating a dead horse (for very long). Nope, I'd lost my leg to Auron, and my targe, and my gear, and all my gil, and -_le sigh_- Deus Ex Machina, but I wasn't about to lose my shirt to the man, either literally or figuratively.

I know what you're thinking, 'So how does our beautiful and intrepid heroine intend to use her luck to get back sitting on top of the cake if she'd given up gambling with Ol' Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails?' Well, I'll tell you. Before I became a guardian to protect Yunie from herself, really, and everyone else that's always encouraging all her suicidal tendencies, before I became a mechanic and took my first speeder apart and put it back together again with only three missing pieces and a way higher top speed, and even before I became a thief when I stole the pocket watch from Pop's back pocket for the first time -- before all of that, I was a treasure hunter. You kind of have to be if you grow up in the desert. Finding anything out there -- even Home if you manage to toddle out of sight distance -- is totally a treasure hunt.

So yep, you guessed it. I was hunting treasure. How did I think a pile of riches and rarities would help me out of this mess I was in with Auron? Well, to put it bluntly, riches _never hurt_. Gil makes Spira go round, no matter what those dolorous Yevonites may say about sacrifice and summons and dead guys and pyreflies. Since I couldn't _win _my swag back from Auron, I figured that if I found something good enough on my little romp, then I could always barter for it. Tit for tat. There's nothing shameful about trading, and I was sure I could find something that he wanted more than my right leg. I mean, my leg doesn't even come with thigh-highs like Lulu's. It was like getting a ratchet set without all the ratchets. He had to realize I'd given him a raw deal.

It was kind of especially raw since I'd up and left with his merchandise still attached to my trunk. I did leave him a very nice little note and an IOU for my leg, and I also left Deus Ex and my targe as a sign of good faith, but I know if someone made off with my loot then I'd be way cranky about it, no matter how nice a note they left. He was going to take some _serious _buttering up when I got back or he might just keep my leg IOU out of spite and if Pops ever found out then I'd get a hiding like you wouldn't believe. So I had to find something extra good, you see. I was kind of hoping pipe-dream-like that I'd stumble upon the fabled treasure of Yevon-Ra and have enough gold plated junk to sell that I could maybe raise enough to bribe Yojimbo in to limit for us. It's the kind of thing that would give Auron his jollies, I think, and really, he has to be curious about it, since we've never met anyone who can even _claim _to have seen Yojimbo break. Satisfying his curiosity has _got _to be worth more than my leg. In fact, probably it's worth a lot more, since I can't imagine from his facial expression that he's curious about much any more. He's older than a garbage scow, and I think he must know just about everything.

So, all I had to do was rely on my luck and trust it to lead me to a big ol' stash of metaphorical truffles.

I think you can guess where this is going.

I'd always been lucky -- that is, until I went toe-to-toe with Auron.

Those truffles were going to be harder to nab than I thought.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabi-hime )**

**Chapter One - Follow the Queen**

You've got to wonder: how do things like adamantoises get into caves in the first place? I mean, I can't claim to be a walking encyclopedia on fiends the way the Crusader master trainer is, but I do know that there's no way an adamantoise could get through the crevice I'd come through -- even if it were a _baby _adamantoise -- and there's no such thing anyway. Fiends are born fully grown -- everyone knows that. Otherwise killing little kitten Coeurls constantly might get to be too much even for somebody with as much practice at it as, say, Mister Dependable. I can _way _see Auron crying over mashing up little kittens. _Why, Fluffy, -why-?_ Anyway, fiends aren't born wee, so all I can figure is that some pyreflies are just drawn underground where they coalesce into crap like adamantoises that will never _ever _be able to squeeze their huge horny shells through the cheese grater cave openings.

Really, that has to make adamantoises feel a little impotent. I bet the other fiends make fun of them -- tubby guts and all -- and they never even get to feel the sun. That's a little sad, even for a fiend.

That _must _be why they're so bad tempered.

You can bet your autographed portrait of Maester Kinoc that the one that had me backed up against the wall was _way _bad tempered. He made Auron seem like jolly old Father Yule with jingle bells on, and red coats aside, the two of them _don't _have much in common. I dunno if you knew that or not. I'm kind of an expert on these things.

Okay, back up. You probably want to know how I got from the poker table with Red and Unbearable taking possession of my one and only right leg to being pinned up against the wall in a snowy cave by an adamantoise hungry for a delicious Rikkusnack. That's an interesting story, and it all begins one snowy night in Macalania after I'd lost the deed to my leg in that fateful card game. Well, not long after, that old card sharp decides he's had enough fun and entertainment from me for one night, so he turns in -- looking smug as a mimic who's just gobbled your lock pick _and _your good hand. Not wanting to stay up to listen to Tidus giggle and construct helpful theories on just what ol' Blood n' Guts intended to do with my leg, I turned in too, although not to sleep.

I have to admit, my pride was a little wounded, and it was probably going to end up _more _wounded in the morning when Auron gave me back my leg -- what, like it's not good enough to keep? On the other hand, I didn't want to end up stuck for a week in Macalania with a crappy old claw while we hunted monsters for that old fogie in the Calm Lands and everyone tittered over my leg in Auron's custody. So, as you may have guessed, I decided to cut and run. Now, eventually I was going to get an earful about deserting my summoner and blah blah blah from Mister Likes to Lecture So Much He Should Have Been a School Marm, but really, they could spare me for a _couple _of days while they hunted monsters and I hunted a little treasure. Besides, it's not like they're hard to find, since they go _everywhere _in my Pops's airship. Anyway, I was going to take Iron Grip with me, so I was even helping them out catching some monsters that they might not even run across, besides. It was an everybody wins situation. The important part here was it was also a _Rikku _wins situation, and I kinda sorta needed one of those to buck my spirits back up.

So I wrote a cute little note explaining that I was off for a couple of days and that I'd be back soon and added that if they finished up their monster hunting before I was back, that I'd catch up for sure. Then I thought twice and added the IOU for my leg to the bottom of the note. I didn't want Auron to think I was doing anything like making off with his rightful property (even though I was). I grabbed my old claw and last season's leftover targe and then I slipped out the back. It wasn't that hard really. For my piece of mind I'm going to at least pretend that that's because they were all fast asleep in their beds and not because they were glad to be rid of me for a while. I mean, from what I managed to piece together after the fact, my little jaunt was _devastating _to morale. Well, I like to tell myself that, anyway.

Just a couple of passes out in the snow fields and I'd managed to palm enough gil to buy a few days worth of supplies, rent a chocobo, and even pick up this old piece of junk pistol that I thought might be fun to work on while I was on my excellent adventure. Cost of living in Spira is really not all that bad. It's cost of Saving the World that'll really get you.

Anyway, while I was trying to get a good price on a chocobo -- partially because I was afraid I was going have to cross the Thunder Plains again, alone this time, and there was _no way_ I was doing that on foot; more like just jump on a bird and then let it run -- the chocobo master let it slip that he'd heard there was some good stuff to be had up in the Macalania Hills. He said it was some kind of cave system that he didn't think had been touched in a long time because the fiend infestation was pretty bad. I guess I must look pretty tough -- or maybe he just knew who I spend my time with. Anyway, I thanked him for the tip and then bridled my chocobo -- Frances -- and then headed up the mountain.

Frances and I got to the place the guy had mentioned in about two days despite the blizzard and _somebody _smiled on the two of us, because the snow cleared that morning, so I only had to spend one miserable night huddled up against Frances's back to keep from freezing to death. I dunno if you know it or not, but my clothes aren't exactly made for zero degree temperature. I told you already. I grew up in the desert.

After the snow cleared, I did a little hunting and after a couple of dead ends, I found a pretty promising little crevice and gave Frances a pat on the butt to go back home, and then crammed myself through, dragging my gear behind me.

That just about brings us up to speed. I did a little digging and I found an old sphere that I stuck in my bag to check out later, and then I decided that faint hearts never ended up with _anything _good, so I went exploring a little deeper and I found some pretty passable loot.

And then, she said, the adamantoise found _me_. And he slung me against the wall and pinned me there with his tail.

I dunno if you know exactly how big an adamantoise's beak is. I don't really think you _can _know until it's a couple inches away from you and snapping at you like he thinks you'll taste good with cake. Or on cake. Or in cake. And that's not even it, because fiends don't have to eat anything. They just run on hate: hate of the living, desires for things that they aren't allowed any more, envy and rage all smoking up inside like a steam engine fit to explode. That adamantoise didn't _really _want to eat me. I could almost forgive him for it if he had -- you know, everybody's gotta eat and sometimes you just end up being snack food. But he didn't want me for dinner, he just wanted me dead. Fiends don't hunt for food, they hunt to _murder_. They hunt because they _hate _the living. They hunt for blood steaming on the ground, not in their bellies. Misery loves company, and this big horny turtle was the misery just desperate to have a piece of my company.

Frankly, I don't want to spend my afterlife as a pussguts angry turtle.

I chipped away at his tail with my claw, but all it did was scratch up the bastard's finish. He had me slung so hard against the wall that I was starting to see stars against the white stone of the ceiling. I could almost hear music in my head, ringing through my ears like a hurricane. It was one of those 'maybe I should rethink my faith before I become paste against the wall' moments that everybody has every once in a while, and I was almost ready to commend myself to Yevon. _Almost_. But then, my pops didn't raise no fool, and I _knew _with the way my luck had been running, _something _was bound to happen that _didn't _involve me becoming sealing paste in the immediate future.

That something happened with kind of a roaring noise; like a motor running with no oil, angry and protesting, then a sharp crack that almost broke my ears in two, like having a concussion grenade go off inside your helmet. Then there was such hissing that I was sure the adamantoise was shrieking and that was his way of greeting his dinner, his killmeal -- hiss, snap snap and no more Rikku -- but then he was trembling, shaking like popcorn on a hotplate, and everything went all blurry-steamy whirlwind of light, and I slumped against the wall where he left me, on my hands and knees, scraped up from his careful attention and gulping down air as fast as I could burn it into my lungs.

I saw stars raining again and it took me a few seconds to realize that they weren't stars, and that there were pyreflies swimming through the air all around me and that's what had made all the steam and hissing and was making my eyes sting even now.

Then I saw his boots, shiny-dark and still wet with melted snow, and stupidly, all I could think was _how did he manage to fit through that little hole?_

"Hn," was all he said as he shouldered his nihontou, tapping it idly over his shoulder, "As I expected."

He really always knows just what to say to lift your spirits, doesn't he? Nobody had _asked _him to come to my rescue. Certainly not me. I had been very specific in my pleas to a higher authority that _whoever _it was that bailed me out of this situation, his name had better _not _be Auron.

"Gee thanks," I managed as I flopped back against the wall, still breathing like an asthmatic in a marathon, "I'm way glad to see you too."

"I'm sure."

"How did you find me?" I asked, slowly catching my breath.

"Chocobo scat."

I rubbed my forehead and then went boneless, "Those things shouldn't be allowed to come in sizes that big."

"Too big for you to handle," he said, and it was not a question.

"Not so much too big as too thick-skinned, but if you're waiting for me to say 'Why'd you do that for, I was doing fine on my own,' you may as well keep waiting, because I'm not gonna."

"Contrary."

"It's what you want, isn't it? So you can give me a lecture about responsibility or something. I dunno how this ties into responsibility, but I'm sure you could make it if you tried."

"No."

"You couldn't? No, I bet you could. Don't sell yourself short there. I've heard you get going before, all _blah blah blah pilgrimage_ this and _yak yak yak yak duty _that."

"I'm not interested in lecturing you about responsibility."

"Why?"

"I think it's a lost cause."

"Hey! That's not very nice!" I jumped to my feet, hands ball fisted at my sides. It didn't matter that most of the time I agreed with the things that he said. He always picked the worst way to say them, like he took some sort of perverse satisfaction from roughing people up inside as much as possible. It was like everything he said was a threat issued at whoever was listening to him, like he was waving in challengers, daring them to take try and take a piece of him. This was his challenge to me, like we were in a pissing contest and he was winning. He was _way _winning.

"Neither is running off and further complicating Yuna's life by making her worry," and it seemed like he always thought five squares bigger than I did, and he was merciless at bringing his cause/effect gun to bear. It _wasn't fair_ -- I hadn't be hurting anyone or anything and he always made things so complicated, too complicated, like he'd forgotten why you do things just to _do _them, and it was like he was taking some pent up frustration out on me, because he could never say anything to _Yuna_, Yevon's gift to self-centered, self-sacrificing martyrs everywhere and _dammit_, why had I even thought that? I _love _Yunie_, I love her so much_, and I felt like crying, right there, like he was wringing the tears out of me like you squeeze an old dishrag.

"I thought you said you didn't want to lecture me," I spat, shaking my head, trying to catch myself, trying to ground the current running inside me before I either fell down crying or hit him as hard as I could or maybe did both in hopes _one _of them would make me feel better.

"There is a difference between lecture and fact." Nothing is sure in this world except Death, Taxes, and Auron. He made me feel so small and so petty, caring about my stupid pride when Yuna had _none_ and had married a pot-bellied daddy-killer first to make _the world_ happy, and then to save all of _us_. But maybe that was part of Yunie's problem. Maybe we'd have all done better if she'd had a _little _pride.

"I wasn't deserting her, I was only going off on my own for a couple of days," I defended, breathing hard and fast and fighting back sniffles that made me look and feel like a refugee from the first grade brigade. A couple of days, that was all it had been. Just a little while on my own, to remind me that maybe not every single moment of my life now belonged to Yunie and defeating Sin and nothing else. A couple of days to _forget_. I _was _being selfish, wanting a little piece of pie all for myself, but is it always wrong to be even a _little _selfish? It seems to me when all you have is selflessness, you end up with a bunch of dead summoners and Sin almost deified by people _obsessed _by loss.

"A couple of days would have stretched into a lifetime for Yuna when your blood was spilled to mortar the stones here. If I had come even a few moments later, all I would have found is a smear." A smear. I wanted to be a smear now, because a smear couldn't hear, a smear wouldn't understand what he was saying, _how _he was saying it.

"I can take care of myself!" I was at the end of my rope now, near hysterical because he'd bullied me into it, and now I was shouting the same things at him that I had shouted at my father a few years back when I had been thirteen and feeling out my jesses hard and fast, screaming away from Home then jerked back so fast it made whiplash seem the kinder and gentler way -- it was like he had a rubber band around my waist and a crank pull and a revolving door to help the process along.

"You were doing so admirably, yes."

"_Shut up!_" I shouted, fisting my hands, and then I knew I was far too deep into the mire of Stupid Things Rikku Says to do anything else but ride it as I cried, naked and raw and hating him for staring at me dispassionately, like I was an unseemly child and he was so _tired _of me being that way, and didn't I have anything _better _to do with myself? And I hated myself for wishing I was different, for wishing I was like Lulu or Yuna or even stupid, dummy Tidus, who always looks after all of us, even _him _and I couldn't do _anything _right and _he _knew it and _he said so_.

I threw down my claw and I ran, because running is what we all do when we can't think of something else to do, and I didn't know if I was running from Auron or from Sin or from myself and all I could think was _stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid_ and I didn't know who was stupid or why, if I was hating Auron or I was hating Spira or I was hating Yevon or I was hating _me_. I was just running as hard as I could, staggering over the uneven ground, scrabbling over stones and and slick ledges like I was a delirious little monkey, choking because everything was horrid and wrong, and I could hear his heavy boots on the stone behind me in cadence, like my deliberate shadow. _He didn't even think I could run off and have -a fit- by myself._

_Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupid._

I threw myself around the a huge, gently rounded boulder and then everything all seemed to melt away in front of me, and there was nothing before or behind but blackness, just emptiness, because I'd staggered off the rim of a hole, wide as a river, that seemed _bottomless_ the way the darkness ate up at the wall sconces like it was tactile, liquid, and my pulse slammed into my ears once, hard, and my stomach fell out inside like a mess of worms. That's when I knew I was gone, because I _couldn't fly_, not like Yunie, aeons bursting out like magic and fireworks from her soul, soulfriends to help her when she was in need. I couldn't fly because I wasn't _soul_. I was sand and sweat and machina and knee socks and regret.

And I fell.

But then I seized up, the same way your muscles seize right before you're going to throw up everything you've got down and it was hard and soft and hurt like hell because he had me slung under his arm like a chicken at market, a chicken he didn't want to lose, or maybe a chicken he wanted to squeeze the filling out of, like I was a pastry, and he'd thrown his sword down to catch me, and I could still hear it ringing against the stone where he'd struck it in so hard that it was still standing. And then I laughed and laughed, beating my fists against his chest like this was a sensible way to draw his attention, and I had lost it again, but this time from _joy, _because my luck had shifted again and _shifted beautifully into this perfect, wonderful insane corkscrew_, and I was hanging out of his arms over a depthless staircase like the poorest invalid ever and I was _laughing_.

Spiraling out of the darkness below us like the most euphoric thing I have ever known came the first voice, deep and bass like thunder, balanced and then surpassed by an alto that hummed like the rain, singing up around it like knitting coming together, chorded, into one whole _magnificent_ thing.

_Ieyui Nobomenu . . ._

The fayth. We had found _the fayth._

----

Review or I will punch you.

Love,

Gabs


	3. Chapter Two: Under the Blue Chip

I'm not really a religious kind of person. I mean, being born Al Bhed kind of helps there, and before you go off believing the trash that Yevon is always talking about us you should know that we _do _have our own kind of spirituality. We just don't believe in predestination and sacrifice and some jerkoff higher power who has nothing better to do than sit around and watch as thousands of people -- kids, old ladies, babies, it doesn't matter -- are killed by Sin. We don't believe in a god who would punish us for _dreaming_ too hard. That's bull crap, and I don't like the belts like Wakka does. If there _is _a god like that then I don't _want _to believe it. We should get a new one; trade him in at the god mart or something.

But no matter -what- I feel about Yevon, something happens to me inside when I hear the fayth sing. It's like a sprout popping out of its seed casing somewhere in your stomach or your intestines, and twining up like it belongs there, like it's making you _you _by being inside. Some people think the Hymn of the Fayth even predates Yevon. I wish I knew for sure. Maybe it would make me feel better about things, because the hymn tells you who you are, deep inside, like naming you in the most intimate way, like all the letters in your name have as much meaning as a whole _language_ by themselves, and they spell who you are in Spiran or Al Bhed or Hypello or Ronso, it doesn't matter, it knows -- they know -- who you are and _you _know it because they're _singing _it and it's in every note of a song with only seven words: every single secret you ever wanted to hide, every single thing you never wanted anyone to know. It's all there for you to hear, and somehow that's comforting, because they _forgive_. The fayth forgive like Yevon never does. All they -do- is forgive and accept. You can hear it when they sing. The fayth love as much as Sin -- Yevon -- hates. They love unconditionally. They love _you_. They love _us_. Each alone, _personally_.

And somewhere down in the middle of it is this intense -longing-. Its hard to really explain, almost like you want cherry ice cream but know you'll never have it again because cherry trees are extinct or someone has uninvented ice cream or something, only you crave it with _every little piece of yourself_: your heart and stomach and kidneys, your whole _body_, -and- your mind, but it's almost like you've forgotten what cherry ice cream really is, you've been wanting it _so long_ and _so hard_ and if you ever got any you know you wouldn't be able to eat it, only sit by it weeping because there it is, what you needed for so long: cherry ice cream.

But what the fayth need, it's _more _than cherry ice cream. It's something else, something I don't think I can put into words. It's like if cherry ice cream were a _feeling_, like sun on your neck or an ice cube down your back or being kissed for the first time or dancing outside in the rain -- no thunder. The fayth want something that burns in the bottom of my belly whenever I hear them sing, and as I hung there slung under his arm like I was made of nothing, I began to sway softly in time to the music, like I was a charmed snake -- green mamba Rikku, that's me. But I _was _charmed. The fayth do that, and my eyes slipped half shut as I listened to the song climb out of the darkness below us, spinning up on air and light.

_Renmiri Yojuyogo . . ._

And it had never really occurred to me that someone might _know _what they wanted, not Maesters or Priests or High Summoners or any of them, because nobody ever talked about it, they never said _anything, _but it was climbing up my spine rung by rung, in my heart, more than it had ever been before and it was almost shaking tears out of my eyes, but not the same tears as before, not tears about _me_, but tears for something else, tears for something I didn't understand slickening my eyes like condensation on a glass.

_Hasatekanae . . ._

And I shook like a dog trying to clear its coat of water, and he set me slowly back on the ground. I almost wasn't ready for it. I thought I was, but the second my feet were back on stone, my knees gave out and I crumpled like paper. The fayth, they do that sometimes, just usually not to sticky little Al Bhed non-believers. He caught me around the waist, thumb gripping my belt and lifting me by the seat of my pants, like that was the easiest handle I had on me -- and it probably was, outside of my ponytail -- and he held me there while I got my feet under me again, weak and unsteady as a kitten en placenta.

His nihontou was still quivering where it was thrust into the stone, so I staggered over to that and leaned on it, folding my hands over the cross piece and laying my cheek against the hilt. It held my weight, so I didn't fall again like a kid all vertigo after his first speeder ride -- and this wasn't my first time at the hymn, what was _wrong _with me?

Leaning there, I could finally catch the breath that had been rattling in my chest. I could finally ground myself against the steel. I closed my eyes and almost didn't want to speak, but then when I did, my question hung in the air the same way that the chant did, beating out the seconds in my heart.

"What is it?" I nearly whimpered, my voice whispery and soft where I'd meant it to be steady, "What is it that the fayth want?"

He didn't move a step, only turned his head slowly until I was under his one heavy eye, dark as a lodestone. He tucked his arm back into the folds of his gi and looked as if he were surprised that I'd spoken. He stared at me as if I were a foreign thing, something wrong with this picture, like a piece of spaghetti draped over his nihontou and then forgotten there, then slowly, his eye narrowed and became impossible to read with the glare of the torch spheres against his glasses. When he spoke it was as soft as cat feet, distracted, like he wasn't talking to me at all.

"Life," he said quietly, his eye roving as he turned his back on me and faced the abyss, "They want to live."

_Living_. No wonder I'd thought of cherry ice cream.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabi-hime )**

**Chapter Two: Under the Blue Chip**

It took a while for me to collect myself. Heck, who am I kidding? It took us -both- a while to collect ourselves against the chant that made the air pregnant with need and _unconditional _love. He was a rock -- he was an island -- or so it seemed most of the time. Here, at the top of this spiral staircase picked out like bone descending into the belly of a cadaver, turned away from me and facing the darkness, I could watch his robe shift very slightly from time to time and wonder at the muscles twitching in his back. The fayth touched him some place too. They had to. They touched _everyone_.

I sat down on the lip of the stairs and tucked my knees to my chest, my earlier elation turned first to euphoria then to drunken opiate that was finally coming under control. His sword was still thrust into the ground behind me, unattended. I took a deep breath, and then I finally spoke, stuttering on the first words to break the silence that had hung between us, on the melody, for some minutes since our last brief exchange on _need_.

"In Macalania," I started, hunching over to fiddle with my shoes, "In Macalania, the fayth that sings is a woman, right? Shiva is a woman."

His heavy eye rolled toward me again, and it suddenly occurred to me that he only ever gave me one eye at a time, like a shark. I think he would've done that even if he'd had _two _good eyes, and not just an ugly scar seaming his face and fusing his right eye up.

"Nnmg," he grunted, then he turned and wrenched his sword from the ground with one sharp tug, "Macalania's Shiva is a woman, yes." Unstated in his voice was the hanging _and?_

"The fayth singing here," I explained rapidly, still fidgeting with my shoe, "It's a man _and _a woman. _Two _of the fayth. That means we can't be hearing some kind of weird echo from Macalania Temple." He must know what I was getting at. Auron's not a dumb guy. Not by a long shot. Sometimes I wish he was. Dummies aren't so good at poker.

"We're too far away from Macalania to hear the fayth singing," he stated, shouldering his sword and tapping it idly over his shoulder, "No matter what the tricks of the acoustics." Again, hanging in the air was his provoking _Your point?_

"The fayth here, they must be _different_," I explained frustratedly, nearing the edge of my tether and wanting to get up and hop from foot-to-foot doing what Pops always called my 'itchy dance,' "Not Valefor or Ifrit or Ixion or Shiva or Bahamut or," I stopped and a shudder rolled down my spine like ice water, "Or _Anima_."

There it was still, calm and quiet, one eye fixed. _Is this going somewhere?_

I almost wanted to punch him.

"We haven't met this fayth. We haven't _at all_. This must be a lost fayth, or a forbidden one, or a forgotten one, or something!" I strained to keep my voice from jumping like a rabbit. I was all fizzed up like a bottle of juice that had been shaken for too long, but I was trying hard to keep it level and steady.

"Nngn," was all he said, then simply, "Yes."

I really did want to punch him. My fist his solar plexus very satisfying, even if I figured I'd hurt myself more than anything and that he wouldn't take a dent. He's got more stamina than a log -- maybe a _petrified _log. I think he's really carved out of granite and just made to move around. Maybe he's a really lifelike A.I. machina experiment from the past! Yeah, like I was so lucky. This was just regular and charming old Auron: legendary guardian and _legendary_ pain in the butt.

I squirmed against the stone under me and tried to stay logical, "This isn't a fayth from the pilgrimage. This isn't a fayth that summoners _get_ on the pilgrimage. That means they don't use it to fight Sin. Yunalesca," my brow knit, remembering the rush of purple soulfire and snakes_. I -hated- snakes, _maybe more than thunder, "That crazy old bag said that the Final Aeon was the only hope of defeating Sin, but how can they know that if summoners don't fight with -all- the Aeons?"

His absent sword tapping stilled and then stopped and then the barest smile crept in around his mouth where I could see it behind his collar, all belts and buckles, like I'd finally discovered a Yule present that he'd hidden under the tree for me and he was _satisfied_, "They don't."

I was thinking out loud, building a picture in the air, miming it, as if he needed a visual aid. Maybe -I- did, "It was so easy, you know? Deciding that no one was going to die when we fought Sin, but deciding something is true and _making _it true are different things, and I've been _so _worried about everything. Like what if we get there and we can't do it? Everyone has tried before -- "

"_No one_ has tried before," he cut me off, lowering his sword to rest point against the ground again, "No one has tried without the Final Aeon."

I shook my head. He knew what I meant, no matter how important that part of it was to him, "And I keep thinking 'What if we can't do it? What if we can't defeat Sin?' Not because _people _aren't strong enough to do it -- I think people are strong enough, smart enough to do _anything_, no gods necessary, but what if _we're_ not ready? Wouldn't that be the biggest waste? Throwing Spira's chance away on nothing, or even dying doing it. Spira is always about death. Death, death, death. Dead maesters, dead aeons, dead gods, dead summoners, dead fiends, pyreflies, and old souls. I want it to be about," I stumbled, thinking over what he'd said before about what the _fayth _wanted, "I want it to be about _life_."

He said nothing, so I continued, pell mell and spinning out my ideas like thread from cotton, picking out the seeds as I went, "And I don't want _anyone _to die. Too many people have died already. So when we fight Sin, I want to fight to win, but I also want to fight so that no one has to die. That's why," I stopped and took a deep breath, "That's why I'm so happy that we found this place, that we found the fayth, because it's one more thing that might keep someone from dying. I want to get them. I want to find them. I want to _see _them. Let's go," I said, jumping up impulsively, "Let's go and see the fayth."

It was with one fluid movement that he shifted the nihontou from one hand to the other and his gloved hand was in front of my face, leather and sweat and arrogance, always.

"We must get Yuna. It is her place to see the fayth."

The itchy dance was getting into me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My feet twitched, "It's Yunie's place to do _everything_. I want to see the fayth, Auron," I realized I was begging like a little kid after cotton candy or something, so I tried again, "And I don't want Yunie to get her hopes up if there's nothing here. What if it's like Yunalesca and Zanarkand? What if there's no summon here? Do you want to see the look on her face if we drag her all the way out here and then there's nothing but an old stone statue?"

"The fayth are singing," he said shortly, as if that proved everything, but I could see he was thinking about it. The nihontou was up over his shoulder again, tapping lightly, counting out cadence.

"But it might not be the fayth," I shook my head and started bouncing from one foot to the other, "It could be the dead, like Yunalesca, or potbelly Seymour, or groady old Maester Mika. The dead can sing too. I want to see it. I want to be able to tell Yunie that it's really here, that the fayth singing here are _for true_."

"Even if you see the fayth," he said slowly, stopping to push his glasses up his nose just a fraction, as if he needed to try _harder _to shade that eye that I almost never saw, "You will not be able to take it back to Yuna. Only a summoner can take the aeon. We should go back for Yuna."

"But that'll take _days_," I said, twisting up the ruffled hem of my shorts as I bounced, "We're already _here_. I know I can't take the fayth back to Yuna, but we can go and see it, and we're so close Auron that it won't take long and then we'll have done all the hard parts and Yuna can come get the aeon like it's a cakewalk. I can't take the fayth back to Yunie, but I can take _hope_. Real hope. I think that's something that we've almost forgotten."

One, two, three, four -- he was still counting, "Hope," his voice was quiet, and I wondered just what that word meant to him. I'd seen him in the Zanarkand Dome, seen him just like everyone else had, young and burning like a star. He hadn't wanted Braska to die, even when Braska had been ready for it. Maybe really he didn't give a rat's patout about duty, not when it cost lives, not when the price you paid was the people you cared about, the people who depended on you. Yunie had been happy to give herself away for the world, but she wouldn't give herself away for nothing, and she sure as heck wouldn't give away one of the people she loved. There's an old Al Bhed saying -- Ask me for my own, and I will give. Ask me for my brother and I cannot. Maybe the Al Bhed in Yunie is what makes her different. Maybe just a little bit of heretic is what makes a savior. Maybe that's why we had a chance when we weren't supposed to in the first place. Maybe, maybe, maybe. That's what we were building our ladder from, maybes. It would have to do. We didn't have anything else.

"Let's go, Auron, please. It won't take long. I _promise,_" I wanted to go so badly down those dark, winding stairs and into the middle of the echo of the hymn, to find the fayth, to _see _them, to understand, really _understand_, what it is that they were singing for.

"You _promise_," he repeated, one half of his mouth quirking as if I'd said something he thought was funny, and I didn't so much want to punch him any more. I watched his eye drift, almost as if it wanted to roll around in his head and stare down the shaft behind him, despite the fact that he was still facing me.

"You want to see them too," I said slowly, my feet both on the ground for once. He didn't say anything, didn't shrug or nod, but I knew it was true down in my bones. He wanted to see the fayth. For a second, I felt like I understood him, all bluff and meanness and bitterness and helplessness but wanting all the same, wanting things to be different. Wanting like the fayth wanted, wanting like I wanted, wanting like _everyone _wanted. I didn't want to punch him much then at all.

"Let's go," I asked again gently, all pretenses dropped. I was asking for cotton candy.

"Very well," he said, and it was mine to have.

And we went.

It occurred to me as we went that I'd never gone anywhere with Auron before. I mean, sure, we'd _all _gone together, all over Spira even. We'd been from the bottom of the Caverns of Darkness to the top of Mount Gagazet and it seemed just about everywhere else besides, but we'd gone all of those places _together_. Tidus trailing after Yunie, Lulu, stately as a ghost, Wakka like a firecracker in a box, Kimahri always a sentinel, and then Auron -- our task master. Whenever anyone except Yuna wanted to stop for even a minute, there he was again, driving us like he had a bullwhip and twelve sheepdogs besides. We were always on a timetable with him, and before I had always thought it was because he was set on getting Sin out of the picture no matter what it cost, no matter if it cost us Yunie. I had thought that he was the hugest and most immovable cog in the big machine of Yevon that kept rolling her cheerfully onto her doom. I thought he was kind of horrible and soulless, living totally in the past and thinking of Uncle Braska and Jecht all the time, like he could catch all of them up in the memory he was building by walking the pilgrimage again. Rikku, my girl, I had said to myself in the kindest possible way, Auron _sucks_. And I had believed it and it had been true.

Until we got to Zanarkand. When we'd met that crazy old fruitcake Yunalesca and we'd fought her, it had suddenly occurred to me that Auron hadn't been driving us to face Sin, he'd been driving us _here_, so he could show us what he couldn't tell us. So we'd know the truth about stupid old Yevon and their stupid old tradition of sacrificing summoners for no good reason. For him, maybe it was something too hard to say, the same reason I hadn't been able to tell Tidus what was waiting for Yunie at the end of her pilgrimage. And I'd seen him, stiff as a poker and still begging Braska to stop, to go back, because it wasn't fair -- and I'd almost been proud of him. For a minute there, you might've even thought he was Al Bhed. Braska hadn't listened, but Auron had wanted it to stop, even if it meant running from duty and responsibility and I could really respect that. Duty and responsibility are only so good so far as they don't hurt everyone around you. The second you start sacrificing people for ideals, you're not a human any more -- you're a zealot -- and to me that's the worst kind of fiend that there is.

Sometimes, just _sometimes_, I wondered if he didn't hate Yevon more than I did, and that's an awful, awful lot.

It was kind of strange, traveling with him down that lonely spiral. It wasn't lighted, so we'd pried a glow sphere from the wall and taken it with us. I pushed my goggles to the top of my head and wore the sphere there like I was a miner and it cast dancing patterns over both of us, kaleidescoped light and dark, the way spherelight always is. One step at a time, that was all it was, deeper and deeper down into that hole. It was no use peering over the edge, because you couldn't see the bottom, and he'd had to yank me back by my ribbons when I'd gone all vertigo staring into it.

"When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you," he'd said shortly, "From now on, you walk on the inside."

And that had been the end of that.

So I walked on the inside, skipping down steps so that my hand trailed along the wall, fingertips reading the pebbly tread. We didn't speak, but I like to think it wasn't because we didn't have anything to talk about. It was more that we were on a mission, and we had plenty to _think _about, what with the fayth providing a constant backdrop of harmony. Besides, I liked proving that I could be quiet sometimes. Maybe I was teaching him that just because I had a lot to say didn't mean I couldn't be still, just like I was learning that just because he was quiet didn't mean he wasn't thinking _constantly_. Maybe too much. It wouldn't surprise me. He's kind of a study in extremes.

When fiends came, they didn't come skittering up the staircase, they rose out of the darkness below us, suddenly just _there _in the sphere light. Wraiths and floating deaths and spirits and varunas and all kinds of other things with pale flesh that crept in places where muscles shouldn't have been, with too many whispery spiderweb wings and too few eyes, spitting and hissing and _hating_. At first, we didn't know quite how to handle them, since often they stayed over the nothing, wings beating the air against the song, and neither he nor I were built for hitting things more than an arm's length away. It made me wish for Lulu and a good old ozone burning flare, or even Wakka to pound them with his blitz ball until there was nothing but dust. I only had so many grenades on me, and it seemed wiser to save them for later. We didn't know what we were going to meet in this cave's belly, and I couldn't be guaranteed a ready supply of them until we got back to the surface.

At first we'd swung impotently at them, taunting and cursing and me dancing and doing anything to try and get them to come closer. I came up with more inventive things to call a wraith's mother than I'd ever even _dreamed of_ before. I ought to write them all down one day. Hey, _somebody _might need them. It was maybe silly, and most of the time it felt _totally_ ridiculous, but when they did come close he sliced them in two efficiently, snickety-snack and they were exploding into gas and pyreflies, and I got up close to them, feeling over and through them and inside them, but never touching, you know? Feeling out their souls to catch what they had left inside. Stealing from fiends isn't like stealing from people. People have pockets to pick and watches to grab and if you're fast like grease, then you can even get their armor off of them _while they're wearing it_. But fiends don't wear armor, or if they do, it's a part of them and no matter how _fast_ you are, you aren't prying it off of them before they burst into colors and smoke.

So you have to feel them, and feel in them, smart, fast little fingers prying into who they were and what they wanted, who they had been, why they had been, and when you slipped you fingers slick and sure over the air around them, then they'd _catch _somewhere, like your favorite skirt getting caught on a nail and unraveling, so all you had to do was dig your fingers in and _pull_ and it'd always come away in your hands.

Sometimes it was just old junk, stuff that had been important to them: an old sphere, a deck of playing cards, a broken necklace -- but then sometimes lady luck smiled and you came away with mixed bottles to sort later: potion all fat and blue frosted glass, remedy green and clear as ocean water, tall and thin, with a glass stopper, soft all red and smoky black in a bottle you had to smash to open; and some of the things you pulled away made your body jump and sing -- like thunder caught in glass that glittered like sugar candy or a winning lottery ticket still so hot that the numbers burned into your hand or a cut stone so beautiful that it caught your breath every time that you looked at it -- once you started pulling these things from the air, how could you ever stop? I _couldn't_, even when I pulled things that I didn't want so much, like souls caught in smoky glass and glimmering like fireflies burning out the last of their lives or grains of sand that weighed so much that I staggered under them or razor sharp counter-weights for clocks that were so fine you'd cut yourself on them like you were cutting your lifeline – snicker-snack.

And when the fiends came close, I pulled all of these things from them like I was knitting up a sweater for myself out of their innards, and every time I pulled something away, I tucked it into one of my pockets and then struck them on the backswing, cutting deep with my claw like a cat marking claimed territory. Rikku was here and she took your stuff, buddy. Sometimes they exploded into smoke and glitter and nothing then, but more often his steel would whip through the air the way Pop's old metal pointer used to, pointing out my mistakes and gutting out the lives and deaths that had been left burning after my marks.

But sometimes the fiends were smarter than that, and no matter what I shouted about their genealogy, they weren't coming anywhere near us and Auron's more than efficient cutlery. So we'd just stood there stupidly while spells rained down on us and I kept throwing out bottles left and right trying to keep up with them, but it didn't matter if they wouldn't come close, and I was beginning to wonder if they weren't just going to stay out there until we were cold and mouldery. But then he'd pointed his sword from his shoulder, arm as straight as a level, as if he was challenging, and suddenly I _knew _and climbed up his back like a squirrel and danced out on the blade that stayed still and steady as stone, a ribbon-river of metal that was my bridge over death that groped up at me with cold, stiff fingers, and I didn't look down into that abyss, but _not_ for fear of what might be staring back. Once, twice, and again and it was done as I pirouetted on the far edge of the blade, then a hop, skip back and I was on his shoulders and springing down light as rain.

"Next time," he had said, "Do it in two."

That was Auron: my puddle of sunshine and light and battery acid. At least he hadn't brought up my leg yet. Maybe he'd forgotten. Maybe. There I was, building my ladder again.

The staircase went on forever, turning back on itself: Oroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. I hate snakes. Maybe I mentioned that before. It was hard to judge time on the staircase since we didn't have the sun, or the moon, or stars, or anything at all but watery, shifting spherelight. I thought ol' Impolite Society might keep us marching down those steps until doomsday without a moon to remind him that maybe _somebody _might need to rest once in a while, but he surprised me and called us to a halt before I'd even asked. There was a sphere in the wall, set into an alcove like it'd been left there for us to find. That really didn't surprise me. Temples were always filled with random spheres you had to yank out here and cram back in there, lighting up fairy lights and neon lines and making icicles out of nothing but air and anything else that those sick Yevon bastards could think of that didn't make _any sense at all._ That's why Lulu said I was good at figuring out the sphere puzzles -- because they didn't make sense to a sane person. I promise I'm not going to steal your Yule present out of the butt of a behemoth this year, I _swear_.

So the fact that the sphere was there didn't surprise me, but it was comforting, since it was the only landmark we'd seen since we'd started down this staircase and the patch of slightly lighter gloom that marked the rim of the hole had dwindled down to the size of a one gil piece. It was nice to know we were actually _going _somewhere. I had almost started having doubts.

I guess Auron thought it was kind of comforting too, since he'd called a halt there even though the staircase didn't widen or level at all, meaning we'd be sleeping on a uniformly bumpy incline. I didn't care. Heck, we were _sleeping _and I wasn't huddled up next to a chocobo's behind (just a horse's rear, hardy-har). That was more than dandy with me. It was near _paradise_.

I threw down my gear without much ceremony and began rifling through my pack for the rations I'd brought. Hey, dried meat isn't great, but it'll fill you up if you chew long enough. We didn't have any brush or tinder -- dry wood is kind of scare on a staircase -- but I had thought ahead enough to bring a heating sphere, and that with the light sphere made it _almost _like we had a fire, the two of them like peas in a pod cuddled in the top of my bag. He settled wordlessly next to me and laid his sword down between us. Hunched over on his knees, he finally spoke.

"It's just not the same, is it?" he said slowly, and I was left to wonder what he'd meant by that. What wasn't the same? Spira without a final summoning? Dinner without Yuna's cooking? Me without my beloved Deus Ex Machina? Or did he mean something else entirely? _It's just not the same since Rikku started wondering exactly how old -was- too old and -- _

"It's not the same to camp without a fire," he finished abruptly, prodding the two spheres in my bag with his booted foot.

I nodded dazedly. Boy, I was getting carried away with myself. No thanks, old man. I liked men who were rugged and sexy and not a day over twenty three. I crossed my eyes in an attempt to clear my brain but only succeeded in making Auron look at me funny. I waved him off and then bounced to my feet. The sphere was still in its socket in the wall, so I wrenched it out, if only to give myself something constructive to do that did not involve funny thoughts about Mister Congeniality. He didn't say a word while I went about my business poking and prodding at it, simply watched me with that one heavy eye the color of welding sparks burnt behind your eyelids because you haven't worn a mask like you were supposed to.

It took a while to figure out how to activate. It was an old model sphere, maybe ten years or so, and had a bass-ackwards start protocol on it. When it finally whirred and stuttered into life, lighting up the wall behind me, I was worried that it might die, so I gave it a good, hard whack and then settled back to watch.

At first I wasn't sure, because I'd really only seen Auron, Uncle Braska, and Jecht at the Zanarkand Dome for a few minutes in between fighting creepy weird crap that Yunalesca gave us for our final exam, and I hadn't even been _allowed_ to see the sphere they'd found in Macalania, like it was top secret or something -- I had told Kimahri that I thought it had to have Auron prancing around in pink lace or something and he'd laughed. At least I think he'd laughed. Maybe his mind had been shut down by the very concept and all I'd seen were the last spasmodic twitches of a dying man. Probably the former, since I'd totally seen Kimahri later and alive and not looking like he had a one way ticket to the farplane, but then who can really say?

So I wasn't really sure at first that it was them and that they were _here_, on _this_ staircase in the dark with a light sphere kaleidescoping over them and painting them spattered grays, but then Jecht laughed and slapped Auron so hard on the back that his pony tail flew over his shoulder and Auron made this face that could sour milk and I _knew _it was them and I laughed because he had such a stick up his butt, like a staff had been stuck up there for medicinal purposes like to fix scurvy or rickets or a hunchback or something. Watching the three of them together was comedy gold, especially when Braska had to keep getting between Auron and Jecht to keep them from injuring each other. From what I was seeing, Uncle Braska would've made a great diplomat. He could've maybe charmed the guado into bed with the ronso he was so good at diffusing situations. While he was calming the two of them down, Jecht backed into the spherecorder and the screen blotted out first with his rangy hind end, and then with the sweeping black that signaled the end of a recording.

I clapped my hands delightedly and then rolled the shoulders in my back before flopping down on my elbows, "So why didn't you fess up? If you wanted to come down here even though you knew for sure there were fayth, I would've understood. I won't tattle on you, I promise," I giggled conspiratorially. This new risky business Auron I could maybe even get to _like_, even when he was being his own terrible self.

But when I looked at him, my smile died because he wasn't laughing, he wasn't sheepish, he was just staring blankly at the spot on the wall where the sphere had been cast, saying nothing, doing nothing, still as the dead.

I didn't know what I'd done, what I'd said that had made him go catatonic and just seeing him stare like a piece of half-worked marble -- eyes there but sightless -- made me flutter desperately trying to set things right, like a kid who knows she's been caught taking apart something she shouldn't be, but before I could do anything, before I could say _anything_, he answered all of my questions in twelve and a half words that left me hanging onto nothing but air as the bottom fell out from under my knees.

"That _cannot _be me. I've never been here before in my life."

---

**bang**

Comments appreciated, as always. Bet you wish you knew what was going on, don't you?

Love,

Gabs


	4. Chapter Three: Being the Kicker to Hold

He smelled of smoke, which would've struck me as kind of weird, since we hadn't set a fire, but it wasn't a woodsmoke smell. It was deeper, like fire cooking the water out of clay -- it was a peat smoke smell, smooth and rough, almost musty-sweet like tea, but tea brewed with whiskey-scotch. He smelled like care and arrogance and like something inside of him was a little broken where it'd healed all crooked-wrong a long time ago and he'd either never noticed or never felt it worth his time to investigate.

I dunno, maybe you've met men like that. My family is full of them, with Pops topping the list. Got anything other than a head wound or a gut wound? Then leave the bastard alone. It'd heal up fine on its own. That kind of thinking is why Pop's left pinky finger is permanently crooked. It said how-do-you-do-good-morning with a fanbelt and Pops 'let nature take its course' which really means 'don't bother with it so it's sure to heal more bent up than a speeder running on vodka.' Still, nobody's got a finger bent up quite like my Pops, and I guess I've got to love him for it. You can't do anything else with a man like that, since he never listens to your good advice, even when you explain it very carefully with a shovel. They just aren't the advice taking type.

With Auron, it was something different than just a finger healed up so it stuck out funny. It was almost as if he'd fallen and broken something inside of him and it hadn't healed back quite the way it had been before. Maybe it'd been Sin and Jecht and Uncle Braska summoning himself dead -- and for nothing -- that had fractured him along his fault lines so when the bone and flesh knit back together, it did not do so _properly_. Every once in a while it would feel almost like he had rheumatoid arthritis in his heart or his soul or his kidneys -- some place important -- and working it was like pulling old, sore muscles until it felt like Bahamut doing the Old Bevelle Shuffle along your spine and he _couldn't be bothered._

Still, he smelled good, like rice only starting to burn after all of the water's boiled out. It wasn't lilacs or daffodils or even cinnamon spiced wine like Rin. It wouldn't have been what I'd ordered for my plate at the Luca Pick n' Pay, but it was nice and I _liked _it, which was a little startling by itself, like suddenly discovering you want seconds of liver and onions and brussel sprouts. Maybe he was an acquired taste and I was just finally starting to acquire. Maybe I was just slowly going nutso. After all, it's not natural for a girl to suddenly decide she likes brussel sprouts.

But then, if I _didn't _like brussel sprouts I had picked a pretty stupid place to sleep -- my nose scrunched up between his shoulder blades and drinking up that whiskey-tea scent, my knees bent against the small of his back, one hand splayed out over his ribs reading the slow rise and fall of his chest, the other fisted up tight and pulling his gi all out of shape and up under my chin. This is not the kind of position you get into unless you -_like_- brussel sprouts.

Sleeping next to him was like bedding down with a bear -- and here's where I make the crack about their similar temperament. He was massive, and sleepy-cross, I imagined, but he was also as warm as milk set over a fire, and strangely, equally comforting. His back made a safe little hollow on that cold, naked stairway. He _was _a bear, without doubt, but he was a bear who'd maul anything or anyone crazy enough to tangle with him -- or with the scrabbily mess of arms, legs, and blonde at his back. Ding ding ding. You guessed it -- that was me.

Lying there in the dark, not knowing if it was day or night, not knowing how far down into Spira's belly we'd crawled, not knowing how far we still had to go, it was comforting just to be still and listen to his breathing, slow and even like a metronome measuring out the minutes, almost like he was breathing to pass the time more than breathing to live. My breathing was always quick and short, even when I was still, like all the air was racing adrenaline pumped into my lungs and then racing right back out. Pops always said I breathed like a wild thing -- heck, maybe I breathe like a wild asthmatic.

In the dark, it was easy to be still and listen. The Hymn had stolen away from us at some point on our march. When _exactly _neither of us could say, like it had just slipped away from our brains and ears, leaving us hollow and empty, standing open like confessionals on some kind of national beer drinking holiday. In the deafening silence that followed us, it was easy to be still, the two of us the only sound in the absolute quiet, like the pulse of the world. His breathing, my breathing, my heartbeat like a chocobo in a wheel, running hard and fast and going nowhere, then -- very soft -- the whisper thin sound of wings on nothing, beating like his heart -- slow and steady -- then claws on claws like raw bone against steel and I could hear the doomchant in my heart, the words dancing out like colored floss from a spool long before I stalled the time to open my eyes and _see _it, and I was on my belly over his chest, like a penguin on ice as I pulled the pistol from its holster and it came away oil slick, the way a gun sweats. It took two shots, and then I laid still on his chest, panting.

Pops always said, _it doesn't matter how hard you wallop something -- if you shoot it in the eye, it's prob'ly gonna die._

"I was waiting to see if it would strike," he said calmly, "If it had come low, I would've taken it."

There was no reproach there, no pissiness because I'd taken his kill, no arrogance, just simple explanation. It was like him.

"It was going to doomchant," I said, cradling the pistol against my chest, hammer back, safety off, like it was the most dangerous baby in the world. He let his hand rest against the small of my back for a bare moment, then he hitched me up by my belt again, rolling out from under me so I slid off of him the way water rolls off a duck's back. He stretched to get my side slung holster and then offered it to me by the steel rivet-worked belt.

"Then I'm glad you're a good shot."

**The Shape of His Heart**

**by Gabi-hime (gabihime at gmail dot com)**

**Chapter Three: Being the Kicker to Hold**

Hold on, back up. I'm sure you want to know exactly how it is that I ended up in pretty intimate contact with_ brussel sprouts_, since I've spent most of the storytelling so far harping on how much they're not my type. I'm more of a butterhead lettuce girl myself, or desert endive at least -- thank you Rin. Brussel sprouts are not my kind of blitzball game. Maybe I needed to check myself into the Djose home for the criminally self-destructive.

Anyway, after he'd laid the bombshell on me that he _could not possibly_ be the Auron in the sphere because he'd never -been here- before -- which I was inclined to believe, whackadoo as it sounded, since this staircase was not something you could just close your eyes and happily forget (or even unhappily forget, really) -- I'd remembered that I'd found two spheres in the upper caves before the National Stairwell Classic began, and I hadn't had the time or inclination to check them yet. Fighting varunas all day will do that to a girl.

With the game afoot and a mystery to solve, I felt that the best course of action was to muddy up the waters even more. Sure enough, in starring roles on both the other spheres were Braska, Jecht, and Old Reliable, with a supporting cast of dinner in the first one and the mention of poker in the second one. Even in the watery spherelight, this time it was clear that it was _them _and they were **_them,_** no questions. I had never seen better Braska, Jecht, and Auron impersonators. Slow and Smug even had that sharpish frown that he always has in all of the recordings from his first pilgrimage, like he's trying to out-severe a falcon.

If that _wasn't _Auron, and by personal testimony supported by my gut it _couldn't _have been, then maybe it was his evil twin brother. Or his good twin brother, go figure. I always have a hard time telling with Auron. I think maybe _Auron _has a hard time telling with Auron.

Whether or not Ol' Dark and Musty had an evil twin, I knew for sure that Uncle Braska hadn't, and I feel pretty sure that Tidus would've mentioned having an evil identical uncle _also _named Jecht. That's not the kind of thing you neglect to tell a co-conspirator. Heck, it would've blown _well my brother's name is Brother _out of the water. It's not, really, so you know. It's Yhtan. It means 'strong firstborn son' in Al Bhed. Like anybody would _ever _call him that.

And it wasn't like he was all hidey-hole secretive about the spheres or what was on them. That would've drawn me like a cat after milk, bound and determined to unravel his secrets so then I could maybe play cat's cradle with them to pass the time. No, he seemed honestly baffled, and that's what _really _threw me. I didn't know _what _was going on and we were on that spine of a staircase in the cold and the dark, our spherecast shadows milky-soft around the edges and he told me again that he'd never been here before, and even though it contradicted sense, I _believed _him, and that made all the little hairs along my neck stand up straight and do the twist.

I didn't know what to think, and Pops always says that when you don't know what to think, it's important to _do_. Since I doubted Auron wanted me pawing all over his sword with my kit, cramming on custom after custom just for neurotic want of something to do with my hands, I turned my attention to that old jammed piece of junk gun I'd picked up for cheap back at Rin's Macalania.

Somebody must have fished it out of the sea because it had about seventy three layers of gunk on it, all crusted over with shell white calcium deposits. I didn't even know if there was enough of the actual gun proper left of it to even shoot, but it gave me something to do, cleaning it up, while Auron stared alternately at me and then the smoky, silent spheres that were laid out in a little row like eggs in a nest, as if staring at them hard would make them stand up and confess their hoax.

One dizzy vial of acid later, most of the calcium was gone and I was left with the matte steel of the gunmetal black. Without all that crap on it, it was really a pretty piece -- obviously a showy pistol, once upon a time. It had gold lacework inlay over the chamber that curled up in a delicate filligree bower up the shaft and crested over the hammer, and the grip was also inlaid, although the gold had gone to a dull gray-brassy from age and lack of care. I'd see to that once I'd tinkered with the inside. Like Pops always says: It don't matter how shiny your speeder skiff is if it doesn't _go_.

I think some weird kind of snail must've crawled up inside the barrel and set up house-keeping at some point. There was a lot of weird chunky build-up in there, and I almost wondered if it was even worth trying to dig out, but then I looked up and caught his eye, heavy on me like bent, rusty iron, and I knew I couldn't just throw it down and whine that it was _too hard_. I had gotten to the point where I wanted Auron to start looking up to me for the things _I could do_, or at least, you know, start _noticing _the things I could do, and I'll bet my left leg and arm besides that I'm the best Synthsmith the Al Bhed have ever had. This was just a matter of pride and had nothing to do with brussel sprouts. Or at least, that's what I kept telling myself.

_Fecrehk fuh'd dinh dra cgo knaah._ Thanks Pops. Except not. Shut up.

So I fished out my mallet and the thinnest drill chisel I had and set to work cleaning out the barrel. It wasn't easy work, getting all that junk out of the barrel's inset spiral besides, but I didn't have anything else to do other than play a rousing game of Stare at Auron's Arms Blankly Until He Says Something About It, which I was kind of playing on and off anyway. He still hadn't said anything. Maybe he thought I was just really impressed with the fretwork on his bracer. I kind of was, at that. I'd put it there myself.

Once the barrel was clean, I pulled the hammer back and started fooling around with the firing pin, and that's when I nearly shot my foot off. Really, I just ploughed a furrow sharp through the stone of the step and chipped a bit of it off as the slug buried itself in the bitumen like it thought it was finally going home, but I may as well have nearly shot my foot off from how far I jumped into the air, squeaking like a mouse sucked into an engine outtake.

Now, I know how to handle a firearm. I'm Al Bhed and the first pistol I ever held kicked so hard that my two-year-old butt was always hitting the floor, and you can be sure that Pops never gave me anything without spending a few years days lecturing me on which end you point at a fiend and where the boom comes out and how the safety works. I was sure I was safe digging around the innards of that gun because I was positive it wasn't loaded, or if it was, it _couldn't _be dangerous because it'd lain at the bottom of the ocean for maybe a thousand years plus. Silly me. I guess they really _don't _make 'em like they used to.

Well, whatever it'd shot, it couldn't possibly have been a live bullet. For his credit, Auron didn't growl out anything kin to_ watch where you point that thing, girl_. He just raised his eyebrow and I swear he _smirked_, although he was hard to read in the spherelight behind that collar. He might've been making faces at me forever and I wouldn't have known the difference. Maybe that's what _he _did to pass the time.

I cocked the gun again and then pointed it sure and steady down the shaft of the stairwell and then played at the trigger again and it kicked, not hard, but enough to know from the push and the snappish flash of light that it had spit _something _out of the barrel. The ricochet came some heavy seconds later, faint and far off, echoing somewhere down in the dark and making my stomach sink with the implication of exactly how far we still had to go before getting off this horrid spiral.

"Well," he said practically, "It shoots."

And it did, but I wasn't sure why and I wasn't sure how, but those were both things I was bound and determined to find out. Pops always says that you should never trust anything you can't take apart and put back together again so that it works _reasonably _well in a minute flat. Of course, I never have known for sure exactly what Pops means by 'reasonably well.' Maybe it's more like 'so it works and don't blow up -- _right off_.'

So with that in mind, I took it apart piece by piece until I had a picture of exactly how it worked. For being older than Auron's grandad's great uncle, it was still pretty slick inside. It just needed a little oil and a couple of ball bearings. Cleaned out and reassembled, it unjammed itself and as soon as I cocked the hammer again, all that lacework over the chamber started to spin and hum up the air with warmth and a little static, and suddenly I knew how that gun had managed to have live ammunition in it past a thousand years of rot twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

It was pulling it out of the _air_.

I had found a double action siphon revolver or my name wasn't Rikku Cidolphus -- which it is, by the way. Pops hates his full name.

It was a phenomenal find and I knew nobody'd ever taken the time to really look at it or Rin'd have never let it go -- even in the shape it was in -- for less than a thousand gil. I wonder if Auron would let me bet my new gun against the deed for my leg --

Sheeze. I needed to hide the can opener for that case of worms before I dug myself in so deep that I never saw the sun again.

Anyway, my pistol was pulling ambient magic out of the air, compressing it into respectable bullets, then slamming it out, fast as fire. I knew people who'd've traded _both _their legs for a siphon revolver. My luck? It was looking up. Way more up than it had been, at least.

I told Auron as much and he made some throaty noise, talkative as ever. I _guess _he was happy for me. I could've jumped up and danced a jig, inherent weirdness of the evening aside. Getting that gun working went a long way towards making me feel not so much like I'd just crashed my first speeder into a kindergarten picnic with a high body count resulting. It made it easier to sideline that weird feeling in my stomach that had crawled there when he'd said, serious as a maester: _that's not -me-._

It shunted off some of the panic that was creeping in from being deep in this hole and down that spiral. I'd been underground before, plenty of times, underground and underwater and sometimes both, in the Cavern of the Fayth and deep inside the guts of Bevelle. Heck, I grew up in the Sand Tunnels of Home, underground or half-underground Burning Bikanel and Scorched Sanubia most of the time.

But this was a different kind of underneath, one that curled up in your bones, pushing the marrow out until there was nothing left inside. It wasn't just dark and damp and inhospitable, it was like some part of the darkness was eating at me when I let my guard down, limp and tired. I like wide open spaces and the big blue sky, but usually I'm not afraid of the dark. I was afraid of _this _dark, like I was still a little kid and there was a monster in the closet and it was looking _right at me _and no matter how many times I laid myself down to sleep, it was going to eat me and I'd go down between slavering jaws and that would be that. I didn't even have the reassuring satisfaction that the gruesome would probably eat Brother first.

I shivered and closed my eyes and hoped that Auron wasn't watching me quiver like gelatin at the the patchy blackness at the corners of my vision where the spherelight wouldn't catch and I just knew _it could see me_. I eased the hammer forward on the pistol and then oiled it up slick before sliding it into the holster. I'd have rather kept it cocked, but I really didn't want to have to deal with the look Auron would give me if I accidentally shot him or something.

With my gun holstered and what there was to be had of my dinner in my tummy, I didn't have much else to do but bed down for the night. Auron had already moved up a step or two and settled, back against the wall, face to the dark, one knee bent underneath him. His nihontou was at his leg, his left arm slung in his gi, and he was slouched, his eye closed. Well, night night to you too, buddy, and thanks for the thought.

I myself wasn't much for sleeping sitting up -- it's bad for your back, not that sleeping on a stairway was going to do much for me -- so I unrolled my sleeping roll and skin and then flopped over on it and sighed the sigh of one who has far too little in the way of padding to shield her from the lumpy ground. I propped my chin up on my hands and studied Old Red and found that he wasn't quite asleep yet, because his eye was open again and trained steadily on me. Yippy skippy. Maybe I was going to get a bedtime story. Little Red Auronhood or something.

"You're not going to sleep like that," he said, and it wasn't a question at all, just a statement of fact.

Sleep like how? On my belly? On my bedroll? Wearing clothes? Wishful thinking there. I don't _like _brussel sprouts. I swear.

"Yes?" I tried, hoping this was the right answer and knowing it wasn't really, no matter what he'd meant by his query. You don't say _you're not going to sleep like that _and expect _yes _for an answer.

He grunted wordlessly and stood, shaking out his gi and crossing the space to where I'd curled.

"Scoot," he ordered.

"Yes, boss," I stuck my tongue out, but I scooted just the same, bedroll and all. He immediately dropped, effectively fencing me in from the sheer drop-off only a foot away.

"Hey!" I complained, "I'm not going to roll off the staircase." I wasn't two. I could _sleep _safely by myself. Probably.

"I'm not going to take that chance," he said evenly and clearly brooked no further argument from me, "If you did fall, I would have to climb all the way to the bottom of this shaft and scrape whatever was left of you off the stone. Yuna wouldn't be satisfied any other way."

"Gee thanks a whole bunch, partner," I rolled my eyes and flopped back over, "It's nice to know you care."

He grunted again and I settled in. The staircase was so narrow that I could either choose to snuggle against the cold, drippy wall or snuggle against Auron. There were no other options, certainly none that didn't involve snuggling of some kind. I bet you can guess which one I picked. Well, don't expect a reward for guessing, because I already told you and everything.

It was really kind of nice, having him there. I could almost not feel those glowing yellow eyes on my back. Almost, but not quite. I don't know what's wrong with me. I fight monsters for a living, you know? They don't scare me any more. Crap like _Anima _scares me. I shivered again, ducking my face against his back and curling up inside my skin. He didn't shrug me off or tell me I smelled like peas or anything, so I guess he didn't mind overly much.

"Are you cold?" he asked, and I could only imagine it was because of my shivering.

I wasn't about to admit that I was afraid of the dark. Besides, maybe he'd give me his coat or something. Then I could spend my peaceful evening hours going through his pockets while he dozed. Talk about relaxation. Found: one deed for the right leg, hip to ankle, of Rikku Cidolphus. Cha-ching.

"A little," I said, and tried to sound pitiful. It wasn't that hard. I was jumping at shadows. I -_was- _pretty pitiful.

"Then just be still. You'll warm up eventually," he said, very helpfully.

Yeah, thanks Auron. You always know _just _what to say to make a girl feel better.

If you're entertaining visions of me waking up cradled in his arms, my head tucked under his chin and him still sound asleep, having given in to a subconscious _need _-- not that -I- had been, mind you -- then you may as well not hold your breath, because outside of the occasional fiend that we always effectively dispatched between the two of us, he slept like a rock and didn't move an inch. I didn't even _feel _like trying to loot his pockets while he slept. It was that kind of night.

And it was that kind of morning; tough dried meat gummed until it was half palatable (and, do the math, half _not_) and then me worrying over what we were going to eat when that ran out, small sips of water from our canteens, both rationing already without the words actually passing between us, because we'd both heard the distant ricochet of that bullet. I'm desert born and seafaring. Rationing water is nothing new to me, but it's never something that cheers me up.

With a pistol on my hip that was a tad more effective at bringing down fiends, given the terrain, I folded Iron Grip away in my pack and pretty much gave up on any fiend hunting I might have earlier been counting on to get myself in good with the rest of our dance party. Anyway, if we managed to bring back word of lost aeons? I think that'd pretty surely blow a couple of captured float-eyes out of the water. Why Rikku, you sank my battleship. You betcha I did, or would, or something, once we got out of this horrible place.

Lightsphere settled onto my goggles again and the other four tucked into my bag, there wasn't much of a camp left to pack up. The only thing we had to look forward to was an endless succession of steep, narrow steps turning in on themselves Coriolis style. If that bullet gave any indication, then we'd be going down these stairs for a _while_. He went first and I followed, a few steps behind so I'd be sure to be shooting over his head when we encountered fiends. Two shots, three shots, one shot, I was taking them down long before they got close enough for him to strike. I was a good shot, legs shoulder width apart, arms steady as the Rock of Mi'hen, sighting down the barrel. I shot the throats out of varunas before they could doomchant, their smoky lights spinning off in a carnival glow after they took another slug between the eyes. My bullets went through spirits slow like jello, but they did their damage just the same, carving out wormtrails inside that I could watch spark then ignite, blooming fire inside that ate up their gelatin filling.

Once in the haze we even caught the slow bobbing glow of a lantern, and without thinking, I shot down the stairs and heard the bullet hit soft flesh with a satisfying sink, but then the tonberry screamed and I staggered down under the weight of the karmic backlash, every fiendkill I'd ever made slamming into me all at once, like someone had kicked the backs of my knees until I fell forward on them, skinned and in supplication. Auron took it then, a strike down the center that clove the avocado-soft flesh and the lantern besides. Then he was there, forcing potion down my throat until I coughed and sputtered.

"Next time," he said levelly, shouldering his sword, "Let me take the tonberries."

And I didn't fight him over it. I didn't want to, really. Karmic debt was hard to pay when it came out of your own skin. If he wanted to play the stoic, suffering hero, then I'd let him. He was the one who got to have _Legendary Guardian_ tacked on before his name anyhow. The most I got was something like _Rikku Don'ttakethatapart._ It just doesn't have the same kind of ring to it.

Without any way to tell time, we marked the day off through varunas and spirits and tonberries and float eyes, skewered and spatula flipped by Auron's sword or riddled up with bullets courtesy of me. Going at a steady march, we covered a lot of ground, and although I tried to keep count of the number of stairs we descended, I always lost tally around five thousand or so. I had given up skipping down the stairs. Everything was too heavy down here, even the air. If he noticed I'd stopped being a Jolly Jessie, he never said anything about it and stayed as silent as a tomb. Our conversations died before they were even born, still and dry on my lips because down here there was just no use _trying_.

Sometimes I felt over a thousand years old and I wanted to sob and sob and _I didn't know why_, and always always always always I could feel those eyes on me, even if I couldn't see them.

When we stopped for lunch, he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed and I was grateful for even that little bit of human contact. I felt so terribly alone that I wanted to get as close as I could to him and then burrow inside his skin and live there in the warmth, so there wasn't a Rikku left or an Auron, just a mixed up amalgam Auronrikku, and I wouldn't be alone in the cold here any more, and I wouldn't feel those eyes. He squeezed my shoulder again and then let his hand drop like snow and I ate some more too-salty jerky.

That night we camped beside another sphere recess, and I tried every sphere we had with a quiet kind of desperation. None of them did anything. I was not surprised. After dinner, I got out my synthkit to tinker on my gun a little more to keep my eyes from the crawling darkness that was creeping all around me and inside my head, and I made a few bad jokes that his mouth quirked at -- not quite a smile. I think we were both beyond smiling, although I was still _trying so hard._

I dropped a screw and it bounced down a few steps before I lunged after it, knowing I had no spare to replace it. Fortune smiled upon me and I found it in a jagged edged furrow cut into the stone and suddenly I got very very still.

Carefully, I picked the screw out of the crevice and as I did my fingertips brushed the smooth compacted metal of the buried slug.

"Auron," I said softly, all pitiful trembly like the _littlest_ kid -- I still believe in Father Yule, I do, I _do_, "We were here before. We've been going in circles."

There was nothing from him, just silence, cold, soft silence, and then very carefully came the two quiet, even words that gutted me neck to navel.

"I know."

----

Okay, I cleaned up this chapter so now it doesn't sound like Black Tango wrote it. Thank you again, all my fantabulous readers, and I swear to god I am not seriously rewriting All Dogs Go to Heaven at THIS EXACT MOMENT XD.

Guaranteeing 1000 percent Grade A Original Content every chapter,

Love,

Gabs


	5. Chapter Four: Building Our Big Cat Flush

"I'm not going to eat it. Never. _Never_."

I have some standards. Even stuck underground with the world's least personable gourmet carrion chef and so hungry it felt like my belly had gone all cannibal and was setting upon my spleen at_ this particular moment _-- even then, I have some standards. Pudding? Doesn't cut it. Will never cut it. I will _starve to death _before I eat _anything _made with a pudding.

"It's not really my business -- "

Okay, before you start thinking that I'm not a red-blooded Al Bhed girl because I don't like pudding, I should make it clear that the pudding that we're talking about? It's -_not- _the pudding you're thinking about. Banana cream? No. Chocolate Parfait? No. No, the pudding we're discussing is the kind _with eyes. It can wiggle around on its own without you shaking the bowl._

"It is _so_. We've been stuck in this cave for _years _and we have no food and almost no water. At this point? My business? Totally your business. Your business? Totally my business. End of story. But still. I'm not going to eat that. Ever."

Common Cave Pudding - _Cyanea_ _Spelaeum_ -- Also known as slimebabies, flanettes, cave jellies, and the _total _grossness. Before you start imagining us chowing down on tubby old flans barbecued by their own firas reflected back at them, you should know that that's flat _silly_. Flans are fiends. You kill one and they explode into fairy lights and smoke, just like anything else. There's nothing _left _to eat, let alone barbecue. Who'd want to eat something made of angry old souls anyway? To me, that's just asking for indigestion.

"I bet it's delicious."

My little white Al Bhed butt.

"Auron, you are more full of crap than a septic tank."

Anyway, cave puddings? Totally not fiends. They're an actual indigenous Spiran lifeform. There are some fiend specialists who think that the first flans came about when angry pyreflies with puddinglike dispositions coalesced into something _like _a pudding, just like people with doglike dispositions coalesce into things like coyotes and white fangs. Only flans are a _lot _meaner, bigger, and smarter than puddings -- which admittedly isn't hard. I'm not even sure puddings _have brains_. Strike that, I _know _that they don't have brains. They're translucent. You'd be able to _see them_ if they had them. So yeah. Puddings? Not winning the Al Bhed Prize for Literature in the near future. Ix-nay on their survival instinct too. They certainly hadn't been hard to catch. Auron had just said _go pick some of those up_, and like a big dummy I said _sure boss_, cheerful as a bunny.

"Eat it."

How was I supposed to guess that the damn fool wanted to _eat _them? And what's worse, he wanted _me _to eat them too.

"It's gonna taste like _crap_. Maybe _worse _than crap. I dunno about you, but I don't usually eat things that were blue and jelly when they were _alive_."

It was also bad because they didn't have anything but these huge round eyes, deep as a kitten's. Under different circumstances, I might've begged Auron to let me keep one as a pet. As it stood, eating one of them was something like spitting a puppy on a fork and roasting it over an open flame. In case you're having trouble with that analogy, let me just state clearly: _not kosher._

"You should eat or you might die."

Even the one that had been half cooked still had the eyeballs floating in it like sunny side up egg yolks. When I'd told Auron he was a sicko, he'd just rationally responded that the eyes were the most nutritious part. Most of the rest of it was water content and lipids -- both of which we needed if we were going to make it off of this staircase alive and not looking like debutantes from an eating disorder convention.

"If I eat it then _I know_ I'll die. I bet it's poisonous."

"It's not poisonous. I already ate some."

"That doesn't prove _anything_. I bet you could drink diesel and not die. You're built like a _tank. _Me? Not so much built like a tank. More built like, I dunno, a roller skate. An awesome fast roller skate who can be sorting the contents of your pockets before you even know you've encountered her, but still, a _roller skate_. You do not feed diesel to a roller skate-- "

"Listen Rikku," he began patiently, "It's warm pudding or it's warm rat, and we're fresh out of warm rat at the moment."

Not even properly cooked or anything. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it were deep fried and smothered in gravy so I wouldn't know what it was, but not only were we without a full service kitchen, we were also without man's best friend and greatest modern convenience: fire. All the flint and tinder in the world wouldn't do anything useful when we had no kindling. We were stuck warming the pudding over the heating sphere in a tin cup, which, thank our ancestors, was still working. _Haute cuisine_ it was not. _Haute grossness _was more like it.

"No way. _Never_."

"You'll be walking along, down the stairs, and suddenly you'll get so faint -- "

Oh this is just what I wanted to hear: the Perils of Rikku, wilting lily. This is the time when I _know for certain _that all those years learning bawdy sea shanties in something other than my mother tongue were worth it. They were worth it like _fire_.

"I'm not listening to you: _OH WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A DRUNKEN SAILOR?"_

"And you'll pass out and keel over and I won't be close enough to catch you -- "

_"Really not listening, WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A DRUNKEN SAILOR EARL-EYE IN THE MORNING? TIE HIM TO THE TRAFFSAIL WHEN SHE'S YARD-ARM UNDER. TIE HIM TO THE TRAFFSAIL WHEN SHE'S YARD-ARM UNDER -- "_

I'd have given everything I had -- which admittedly isn't that much, me being on the losing end of that fateful poker game and all -- to tie _Auron _to a traffsail at this point. Anything to keep that pudding away from me.

"And then you'll fall."

_"SHAVE HIS BELLY WITH A RUSTY RAZOR. SHAVE HIS BELLY WITH A RUSTY RAZOR. SHAVE HIS BELLY WITH A RUSTY RAZOR, EARL-EYE IN THE MORNING."_

"You'll fall until you hit the bottom of this place with a lurching splatter."

"At least I'll be at the bottom then."

"You _were _listening."

"How can I not listen? Your voice is like a bullhorn."

"Pot. Kettle. Black. Now hush," he grunted, then as an afterthought, "And eat your pudding."

I didn't and I wasn't going to and he knew it, so he reached over as casual as a tail-wagging dog and pinched my nose closed. I flailed and beat against his arm, but like I said before, he's built like a tank. Tank vs. Roller Skate no holds barred arm wrestling? Tank wins. I was intent on just holding my breath until I died rather than open up my mouth, but my body wasn't having any of that, and it eventually gave up and I was gasping for air like a fish. He wasted no time in pouring some down my throat.

I ate my pudding. It was _horrible _and tasted like _crap_. I was sick afterwards and vomited about half of it back up. For some reason, being right wasn't very satisfying.

"There," he said evenly, "Now at least you have something in your stomach."

All I could do was lament mournfully that I hadn't tossed up all my pudding all over _him_. I think that would have made me feel a little better.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabi-hime (gabihime at gmail dot com)**

**Chapter Four: Building Our Big Cat Flush**

We lost our light on the fifth day. It happened all at once, no warning sputtering or blinking or anything like that at all. Just snap and it was out. We stopped dead and I pounded on it for a while, but that didn't do anything to lighten the area. Now, I went to the Rikku Cidolphus School of Technical Barbarism, and I'm a firm believer in the old adage 'If it doesn't work, just bang on it a while.' That may seem like a funny kind of philosophy to come from an Al Bhed synth genius, but you'd be surprised how often it works. I had even begun wondering if I shouldn't try it out on Auron.

Domestic violence aside, beating on our light sphere did nothing productive but make my hand ache -- which really, on reflection, is _not _that productive. We had no matches or torches besides, and I didn't know enough magic to make a twinkle, let alone a steady light. Auron was similarly not a big help. We were now alone and in the dark on a spiral staircase with a sheer drop _for the long haul._ My luck had deserted me again.

Well, there was not really much for it. We could sit still and either wait for a dawn that would never come to us deep underground, or keep on staggering forward. Auron and I? We're both thick skulled as mountain chocobos. I bet you can guess which one we decided on.

"You walk on the inside," I ordered, and I didn't need to see his face to know I'd baffled him.

"I don't think so," he said, and he didn't, but I wasn't finished yet.

"Listen, Legendary Guardian Chubbo, if you misstep and fall off this staircase there's _no way_ that I'm going to be able to catch you. You'll drag me off with you."

"No," he answered stubbornly.

"_Yes_," I fired back, hands on my hips even though that kind of body language is kind of ineffective in the dark, "But if I fall? You might still be able to catch me since I don't weigh _four million tons_."

"You don't understand -- "

"I don't understand why you're retarded," I rolled my eyes, another priceless Rikku moment lost to the dark, "Besides. I'm_ not going _to fall. I was running catwalks in the dark before I could talk," I had already flopped down on the ground and was stripping off my shoes and socks, "Hold these," I ordered, and after a few false exchanges he did, and without complaint. I was up on my bare feet again, toes digging into the stone. There was no way I could slip now. In bare feet? I have to be at least three quarters ninja.

"Now do you understand?" I sighed, wriggling my toes one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three like a waltz.

". . . . Yes," he finally said shortly, but it was a while coming. Then he paused and seemed to consider, "Just make sure you're responsible with my leg."

"_Your _leg?" I sputtered. He _had _to bring it up now, didn't he?

"_My _leg," he repeated comfortably, and although I couldn't see it, I could clearly hear the crinkle of paper that just _had to be _the deed to my leg. I almost wanted to try and snatch it away from him. I didn't.

In the end, he didn't walk on the inside. We found out through trial and error that it was best to send me down the stairs first with him behind me, holding onto my ribbons like the traces on a buggy chocobo. Only he wasn't guiding me, I was guiding him like a regular seeing-eye dog. We went on for some time just like that, me with one hand on the wall reading the irregular pebbling, toes dug into the stone as I felt my way down, never taking the next step for granted. He stayed terse and silent behind me.

After what may have been hours or only a very long stretch of minutes, I broke the silence again.

"You know, my stomach and I are seriously considering cannibalism."

"How good for you and your stomach," he'd answered, all smoky dark.

"You wouldn't mind if we waited until you were asleep tonight and then smothered you, cut you up, and ate your spleen on crackers, would you?"

"You don't have any crackers," he offered levelly.

"Well poop," I laughed weakly, "So much for that good idea."

He chuckled and it became easier to pass the time again, despite it being as dark as the inside of your spleen. When fiends came, I took them: one shot, three shots, two shots, sighting down the barrel like it was an extension of my arm -- only not really sighting, since I couldn't _really _see. It was always easy to sight _them_. Fiend eyes shine in the dark. It's the pyrefly light behind them glowing like a bioluminescent fungus, and that soft glow gave me all the mark I needed, floateyes nothing but one big target -- a blinking sign that said _please shoot me here. _When they were close, I could almost make out the lines on Auron's face in the brief, hollow glow, and we exchanged humorless smiles. His eye picked up the light from the pyrefly flights and would shine softly in the gloom whenever I made a kill. I had to wonder if my own eyes weren't shining the same way -- like we were half-starved and half fiend already. It was times like that that I wanted to crawl into his lap and bury my face in that ratty old gi of his and have him pet my head and tell me that everything was going to be all right, just like my Pops had when I was little. If Auron told me it was going to be all right? Then it would be all right. He would _make it _all right. I was convinced of that much, at least.

Our past knock-down drag-outs about Yunie aside, if the world got broken, he would fix it. That's what legendary guardians _do_.

But he didn't pet my head and he didn't offer me any easy solace. He didn't say 'don't worry Rikku, it will be okay.' He didn't say '_it's all right, no matter what, I'll take care of you' _and it occurred to me that he wasn't really my jolly old grandpa out to bully the world for my benefit. Auron was Auron, and it wasn't really his place to take care of me. He was Yunie's guardian and not mine. Whenever he was being all aloof-comforting it was always for her benefit, because he was _her _surrogate dad. The rest of us? We just got the spill-over comfort. He didn't say _'I'll see to it' _because it wasn't his to see to. It was mine, for better or for worse.

My name is Rikku Cidolphus and I _don't need_ a daddy. I've already got one fruitcake pops already. I think that's _plenty _for any girl. I'm responsible for myself and can't take the easy out of begging bosshog to give me cuddles and make all the decisions for me.

I'm sure if I tried that he'd say something all fortune cookie about it being _my story_.

It _was _my story. I was_ making it _my story, and he was along for the ride. I have to wonder what he thinks _his _story is. I thought I heard him mention to Tidus once that his story ended with Braska. I dunno what kind of crack he's smoking, but stories just don't _end _like that. Real stories? The good stories? The ones worth reading until your eyes hurt and go blurry and you have to put the book down? They never end. Mine's never gonna.

Certainly not down this stupid sucky hole. -_We'd- get out. We'd -get- out. We'd get -out-._

I looked over my shoulder at him even though it was pitch black and pointless, and I tried to smile. _Thanks big guy. You really do know just what to say to make a girl feel better -- or what you -don't have- to say._

It's just like the moon. He's always up there, silent and watching, and sometimes you can look up and draw a little bit of comfort just from knowing he's there.

"You know," I said conversationally, dulling the panic that was always there, creeping around behind my eye-sockets, "I wouldn't want to be stuck starving down this awful hole with anyone else but you."

He chuckled, all smoky-peat, and said, "Is that so?"

"Totally," I said as I carefully felt down for the next step -- one at a time, it was the only way we could go, "Lulu would be less talkative than you are -- although I bet she wouldn't have made me eat that pudding. I bet Wakka would be telling me that we somehow deserved to be stuck down here. Yunie would be so preoccupied with getting to the fayth and keeping me healthy and happy that she wouldn't be taking care of herself and might go marching straight off the edge. Tidus and I would come up with some kind of plan, but it would probably be a _really dumb_ plan and it would end up getting us both killed."

"So I win by default? Hnn."

"Except for Kimahri," I reassured, and there it was: the next step, just as the last step had been there.

"Oh?"

"It's a hard toss-up between you and Kimahri. You're both so -- like this," here I made this _great _series of faces for no one's benefit but my own, since the absolute zero of light kept them all private. Still, I think they were a pretty solid rendition of exactly what makes Kimahri Kimahri and Auron Auron.

"Like what?" he questioned, apparently unaware that I had mime-theater going on up front.

Absurdly, I giggled, that kind of half hysterical giggle that comes on at desperate times, "Like awesome. That's what I was thinking. You and Kimahri? Totally the awesome squad. You should maybe start a band. But, Kimahri might be _more _awesome stuck down this hole because I bet he knows a whole bunch of Ronso drinking songs to pass the time with."

"So Kimahri wins."

"No, you still win."

"Why?"  
  
"Well, it's certainly not thanks to your cooking. I'd rather eat Tidus's noodles in sauce."

"Those were not noodles in sauce. They were tiny rocks in paste."

"So what does that tell you, big man?"

"That I'd rather be stuck down here with Lulu."

"I hate you. Lots and forever. I'm going on strike and not talking to you any more."

"Oh no, how will I cope?" he asked flatly, and if it had been brighter or if we hadn't been in such a mountain-goat-on-a-precipice position, I probably would've jumped him and attempted my Rikku Noogie Special. I made a mental note to be sure and mess his hair up really good in the future when things were not so bad.

In the future, when things were not so bad.

"Auron?" I asked softly, suddenly all still and serious, "What are we going to do?"

"About?" he asked unconcernedly, but I know he _knew_..

"Sin."

It was all there, in that one little word: the despair of the whole world tied up in a spiral.

He sighed, like it was a question that he was long tired of considering and I was sorry that I'd bothered him with it. What _could _we do, really? We could --

"We will do what we can," he said simply, and I could hear the tread of his boots crunch against the stone behind me as he descended a few steps out of time, "It is all we _can _do."

Sometimes, I think I loved that man.

But maybe that's just the hysteria talking.  
  
Being so long underground will do that to you, you know? Some guys come back from hunts and excavations with eyes all round, with too much white showing, their pupils pinpricks of nothing against the glossy blue-white snow of their corneas. They've got the shakes bad, like they've been on a caffeine binge for weeks trying to get an engine running smooth, and when they look at you it's like they're looking through you and into some place else, maybe because the dark has made them so used to staring through nothing until they see things burned into the insides of their eyelids.

Maybe that's how we'd end up when we got out. If we got out. _When _we got out.

One step at a time, one hand reading the wall like it was some kind of ancient text, my gun always in my shooting hand, ready for the things that flapped and the things that crept, the things that hated and were dead, that's the way we went. It was the only way we could go. Sometimes I almost wished for another tonberry, another lantern carrying tonberry, like I might've been able to slide my hands over the flesh and air and pull away some kind of light, like we might've kept that fiendoil burning lantern. Like it wouldn't have burst into light and smoke the moment Auron's sword went singing through it or I buried a bullet in its skull, karmic payback cut from my skin tenfold.

We wanted light and we had none. Maybe there's something deeply metaphorical about that -- but it's probably just neurotoxins from that pudding getting into my head. If I start to sound strange from here on out? You know why.

I don't know how long we'd been going when I began to feel it under my hand. Maybe it had been there all along and I'd just been too stupid to realize it, to recognize it, to feel it churning up under my hand. I had been reading the grooves of the wall for hours, like it was a nameless, wordless song, all arrhythmic -- a mess of notes, pebbles and bumps that had no meaning outside of the ancient drip patterns of the water from varying strata. At first I had read it with my fingers as nonsense scribble -- happenstance -- fractal -- but as the hours slowly passed, a picture began to form in my head of some similarity I couldn't quite place, something I'd seen or heard a long time ago where the bumps had meant music like clockwork all together in a little box that would sing when you opened it --

And suddenly I knew that my hand had been reading.

"_Sing_!" I cried out, half hysterical, dancing like I was barefoot on hot iron. I knew then that he had to think that I had gone off the deep end, but I still insisted, waving my arms emphatically, "Sing! _The Hymn_."

And again, there it all was, like a page from a fairytale about too many thieves that I'd loved when I was a kid.

_Those who would pass must first speak the password._

The faithful must first speak their faith.

My voice was all trembly-wrong, too high-pitched, erratic, like I was a coke fiend doing karaoke after dropping a little too much speed, but I was belting it from my belly as if I had nothing else left to cling to in the world, "_IEYUI NOBOMENU -- AURON, SING."_

This finally spurred him, and then rattling out like a loose tympani drum came his uncertain bellow, _"Renmiri Yojuyogo."_

We were the most out of tune and imperfect duet that there has ever been, of that I am totally convinced. It was like a rooster singing harmony to a grizzly bear after they've both been beaten and malnourished until they were half dead -- but we were _singing_, and _I hoped _that was all that mattered.

We climbed the next lines together, sounding mixed and mashed, all treble-base, "_Hasatekanae Kutamae."_

As we sang, the wall behind us lit up, silver light running through it like a neon-sign flickering on at dusk, glyph sigil shining like a mandala around a small sphere recess I would have never noticed otherwise and I was already scrabbling in my pack, trying to find a sphere. Auron's voice dropped off and he watched me with something maybe kin to reverence in that one burnt out eye of his, but with only my voice spiraling up awkwardly, the ley lines began to fade and I was forced to shriek again, "_SING AURON, __**SING**. HASATEKANAE KUTAMAE."_

Then he was singing and we were lit up again like a yule tree and I crammed the sphere against the wall as hard as I could. It fit like it had always belonged there, lighting us all purple mountains majesty and I almost _sobbed_, I was so happy. I did jump him then, a flailing arm tackle that expressed the wordless and boundless joy of _we're not going to die_ all wrapped up in whiskey-tea and scarlet and a sword juggled off to one hand because I'd seen it clear in my head as soon as the sphere had left the brush of my fingertips.

Our endless spiral had turned into a ring of hope.

Let there be light, and there was, sphere torches burning out of the stone above our heads like they'd always been there and we'd just not seen them. And I was dancing down the stairs, still singing because it was _a time to sing_ and he laughed and it was all smoke on the water and fire in the sky. There was this low wrenching sound and then a pop like a gas nozzle coming loose and he was taking a long swing from that jug of mysterious contents, a libation down his throat that seemed somehow appropriate -- and then he pressed the jug on me. I had never, ever, ever seen him do that before, not even to Tidus, and certainly not to Yunie.

_We weren't going to die._ He knew it too and the lips of the jug met mine and firewater burned all the way down my throat, singeing my nasal cavity and down in my belly where it smoldered like a real honest to goodness flan on top of all that soupy pudding -- with eyes -- and I was really _touched_. He'd just thrown a part of himself to me overhand, and I was going to keep it forever and ever, like a good luck piece made out of string and feathers and your mother's hair.

I still don't really know what's in that jug. It might've been sake, but it might just as well have been behemoth milk. The memory is all blurry-fuzzy in my head, like a spherecorder that's rolled all the way down the stairs and you can't even blame Brother for it. I would _bet money_ on it that it was because of the pudding.

Within twenty steps we were off of the damned staircase _forever_ and I was so happy I could've kissed him, and I seriously considered it, all _hey boss, I think I've got something in my eye, will you come and get it out for mesuperduperuntestedRikkudrivebyliplock_ -- but the more pressing attraction of _new things to look at that were not black and or black _drowned me out in sensory overload and I might've maybe keeled over from the stars dancing in front of my eyes if he hadn't laid a solid hand on my shoulder and said, "Rikku, you can stop singing."

I did stop singing then, but mostly because I thought it might be important to breathe every once in a while, which I think I might've neglected otherwise, being all _shallweGATHERattheRIVER_. I dunno which gods we were praising at that exact moment -- maybe our ancestors who'd brought us this far, but way totally not grossout tick-baby Yevon. Maybe we weren't praising gods at all, but praising ourselves because _we _had done it and _we _were here, providence aside. We had not been _delivered unto the promised land_, we had _delivered our own spanky selves_, and rainbows and motor oil if that didn't seem like a praiseworthy thing to me. _Dear Heavenly Rikku, How are you so awesome? Love, me. P.S. Oh and also Auron for being so good at spattering brains and killing things, but not for that horrible pudding or his awful singing voice, please remind me never to take him to karaoke night in Luca. Love, me again._ Yeah, I'm pretty sure most Spirans spell 'heretic' R-I-K-K-U. It's the shortened form.

The stairway spit us into a checker tiled tunnel with lapis lazuli and aquamarine ribbing the vault, old and smooth like it'd had a thousand years of a thousand hands running over it and I wanted so badly to pry some of it from the walls and carry it with me forever, like antique lace on a wedding gown, that I was already digging in my pockets for a chisel when Auron caught on to what I was doing and gave me this look that might have killed something like a rabbit or a guinea pig or even maybe a dog. I kept my drill bit in my pocket, but that didn't keep me from _wanting_.

Outside of the _gemstones in the architecture_, and the fact that the Hymn was with us again, full and fine, the prettiest thing in the entire tunnel had to be this beautiful little basin carved out of the live rock and laid all around with smooth stones -- and like ice cream with four cherries and chocolate sauce _there was fresh water welling up in it_. I am a desert girl by birth and upbringing. I know an oasis when I see it and I know _exactly what to do_ with an oasis when I see it.

Like a Brother-calibur goon, I stuck my whole head under to get a good drink and then had water down my collar and making the rubber of my shirt stick to me with embarrassing squelchy noises as I hooted and howled and did a screamy-dumb celebratory dance in front of the basin. _We are the champions, my friends._ Auron filled up our canteens and I tried to figure out exactly what kind of frilly snake monster was decorating the bow of the pool, all goldfish fins and whiskers like a cat, long and limp as an over-cooked noodle. I couldn't really tell if it was supposed to be pretty or threatening. It kind of sucked at being both. It was too frilly to be all that scary, too much aquarian lacework and all -- on the other hand? It had these curving serpent teeth in a nasty looking overbite that made me feel that this was not the kind of thing you gave a high society Bevelle lady to keep in a bowl as a pet. It was like a little gold canary that opens its mouth to show you the nastiest canines you've ever seen.

Except, birds don't have teeth. Well, birds that aren't _fiends _don't have teeth. Nobody wants a divebeak at home as a pet, crammed into some little filigree cage so its legs stick out between the bars. They _smell. _And they sing like a hypello figure-skating on a chalkboard. Maybe with an untuned piano strapped to his back.

The tunnel was lit by soft blue-white light spheres set in little gold fixtures that I _also _wanted to nick, but Auron had started so sharpish down the tunnel that I had to jog to catch him. I knew what he was thinking -- we'd already been away from Yunie and the gang for more than a week. This was not the kind of thing guardians are supposed to do, I don't think, maybe _not _even on a mission to find missing aeons. My vacation frolic? It was getting a little more extended than I had originally ever planned. Sidle off four a couple days of treasure hunting in the mountains? Golden. Get lost underground forever with Auron until I was forced to eat his spleen? Maybe not so golden.

For what it's worth, he didn't take the time to lecture me over it again, which is pretty nice. It kept me from having to launch into a rousing chorus of _Auron, Auron Rhymes with Moron_, which I think also did us both good.

The tunnel we were in had a gradual upward slope too. It wasn't much noticeable until I dropped a ball bearing on it to see and had the thing hit a groove in the tile and roll on off like it had a motor attached. Lady luck? She was on my side again and maybe tap-dancing, and I might've started skipping like a maniac down the tunnel had I not noticed Auron flatly staring at me.

Now, I wasn't about to flatter myself that it was the good kind of staring. I hadn't had a bath in forever and I was kind of greasy over my hands from working with the gun so much. It was not really a struck-dumb-by-your-radiant-underage-beauty kind of moment moment and stupidly, the only thing that I could think was _ohnodidIforgettoputonmypantstoday_? even though I hadn't even had the luxury of _taking them off _since we'd started this rockin' adventure.

"What is it?" I asked, laughing nervously and trying to play it off, "Do I have pudding between my teeth and you just didn't tell me or something?"

"Your hair," was all he murmured, as if that explained everything.

Still stuck in the land of not-knowing-what-was-going on, I grabbed at one of my braids to examine it, but it brushed through my fingers. I was about to grab after it when what had happened finally impacted in my small Rikku brain and I _whooped and hollered_.

_"Breeze! **FRESH AIR!**"_

I was gone before he could say another word.

----

Hot diggety. AURON IS PAUL, RIKKU IS CHANI OK GO.

Another little bit in this patchwork done. I heart my readers.

Love,

Gabs


	6. Chapter Five: Bluffs Called, Antes Force...

Pops has always said that he thinks I'm maybe part jack rabbit or desert hare, like Mama got too friendly with a wind spirit or something and then out popped Rikku Cidolphus. Brother? He's more like a sissy kind of drake, all spark and sizzle but no bite behind it. Questions of paternity on the back burner, the bottom line is, when I want to run? I can _run_. When I get going, I'm harder to catch than a greased iguion -- swivel-fast like a bullet from a gun -- running so hard I might eat up all the earth _there is_ before I even noticed.

I was running against the breeze, into that light breath of wind, grinning so all my teeth showed even though there was no one to see my manic smile -- I'd left Auron behind eating my proverbial and oh-so-tasty dust. Torches and sphere recesses whipped by me like fence posts all run together and I was laughing and hopping, skipping and turning on my heel so that my ribbons trailed behind me and I was a little gymnast dancing the soles out of my new shoes.

Except I wasn't wearing my shoes. Those I'd left behind care of the order of one Legendary Guardian Esq. I knew he was somewhere behind me, slow and steady, my socks and shoes slung over one shoulder as he methodically raked through the fiends that I was just _skimming _past, light and breeze and high-pitched laughter. Sorry float-eye, buddy ol' pal. Can't kill you today, I'm off to have tea with _fresh air._

So it was my bare feet against the tile and mortar, ball and heel taking the impact of my sunlight-easy steps as the hymn rose up inside of me again like it was a flower blooming, and I laughed again because I knew Auron would have no trouble finding me, directness of the path we had taken aside, because I was singing at the top of my lungs, first trying to match the rain-soft alto and failing miserably, forced to climb a full octave higher than the bass as I wound my way through that melody. Briefly, ever so briefly, I closed my eyes and wondered if Auron was singing with me, and I almost turned to look over my shoulder to see him, a regular Orpheus in the cave, but before I could the tile was gritty and then sand under my feet and there was _light on my face and I could hear --_

I opened my eyes slowly, like savoring the last bite of your very favorite thing, because I knew there was no way what stood in front of me could match the air castles and minarets I'd been spinning up in my head, what I wanted to see after all that darkness. Since I was opening them so slowly, the first thing that came into focus was a sea of tangerine swimming like soup in front of me, and that alone was enough to force my eyes wide like I'd slipped a little too comfortably close to a tower on the Thunder Plains and been zapped for my trouble.

I was standing, toes splayed in the sand, on a little jetty of rock and earth, on the lip of what really was a copper colored _sea. _This wasn't a lake, because it stretched way beyond even my eagle eye field of vision, and the sound I'd heard? _Waves _lapping against the shore. I'd been sure, I'd been absolutely positive that the sound I'd heard was the ebb and flow of water over rocks, but I'd never expected to stumble right into the surf of a _sea _when we hadn't climbed nearly high enough to break the surface yet and we were in the _mountains _besides -- then I had the presence of mind to look up and I suddenly understood why the water was such an unknowable shade of _orange_.

We hadn't climbed high enough to break surface because _we hadn't broken surface._ Doming us overhead was an infinitely high ceiling of polished, refractive crystal, and growing in colonies all over that was some kind of fuzzy, furry, glowy, and very _orange _goo that was sure to be some weird kind of bioluminescent fungus. I couldn't say for sure exactly what it was -- I gotta confess that fungi taxonomy has never been one of my big hobbies. Anyway, that glow was being picked up by the crystals and refracted against itself, so the whole enormous cavern was lit up like the sea at dawn -- red sky at morning and all that malarkey. There even seemed to be some of the orange glow coming up from _under _the water, so maybe that fungus was a kind of wet/dry affair.

I'm sure you're thinking: _boundless underground cavern lit by glowy orange goop, unknowably large __subterranean sea -- Rikku, how could this -not- live up to your expectations? Your imagination isn't -that- good. _And I might've had to agree with you, because a limitless underground sea the color of carrot juice was indeed not what I had been expecting, but that wasn't what made my mouth fall slack and my arms drop limp to my sides in sheer mind-derailing astonishment.

Now, I've seen some pretty amazing things in my time -- fairy bridges of light and air in Macalania Woods, lightning keeping gargantuan blocks of stone in the air at Djose, the way the pyreflies dancing over the Moonflow make the whole city look like it's lighted even though it's been dead for a thousand years -- but this? This was something -- it was like wind and water had spun a palace out of crystal that caught the orange glow of the stalactite fuzz and lit it up from the inside out, and there was water, there was water everywhere, coming out of ever cornice and buttress head, like the whole thing was some kind of giant, living fountain, carved all over with fish and sea monsters, things with curving fangs and tusks, all throwing up crystal clear water that rained down into the sea again and churned it up, like there was a great fire set right underneath that otherworld place.

It was set on a promontory that jutted up out of the sea, maybe a thousand feet off-shore, that was just large enough for the glass spun dream with no room to spare, like the whole thing had just risen from the sea one day, like a backwards kind of Atlantis, sheer stone cliffs carved slightly by the falling water into channels that fed it back into the bubbling water. The hymn was there, all around me, and everything seemed to pulse with it: the sound of the waves on the rocks, the flush the waterfalls made as the sea again devoured them, it was like we were inside the _belly _of the hymn. I just stood there staring at that marine cathedral, like I was a kid seeing my first hover and jimny cricket wasn't it something?

And it was then that I first noticed it -- or maybe it was then that it first came into being for my benefit. I would always wonder later, if it had always been there and I just hadn't seen it, so caught up in the newness of _everything_, or if it came to be only because I stood there, my arms at my sides, the hymn stilled on my lips, waiting and _wanting so hard._

No matter how it had _begun_, it was _there_: a bridge maybe five feet wide, built of light and air and golden spiderweb thread that arched from the black basalt sand of the beach to the fairy light of that great fountain. It called to me and said: _Rikku, this is the way_.

I believed it so I went, bare feet over the spiderweb gloss that I could catch between my toes, looking down at that churning sea, not caring that only light and air kept me from those depths, which I would later learn were miles unto endless deep and only looked so shallow because of the free floating colonies of fuzz jellies that lit them so low and wide. But I went lightly and unafraid, because that place was calling to me, almost like it was calling me home. I am desert raised, but I was born on the ocean, and there's just something about it that will always stay deep in my bones, deeper than blood and deeper than marrow.

It seemed that almost as soon as I stepped on that bridge of air and light that I was stepping off lightly onto the crystal-stone of the promontory, like some kind of magic had shortened the trip of a thousand feet to only a half a dozen steps, and the wind was whipping my hair now, like a tempest maelstroming up my braids and trying to unravel them loose between its fingers. I was here and it was calling, and the huge door built as if it were meant to let in some kind of giant or monster swung curiously easily under my fingers, and I was again between lapis and aqua-marine and great hollow crystal pillars with water bubbling up inside them, presumably to feed those endless fountains.

In the center of that hugenormous room was a thick tapestry rug that looked like it might've taken someone a hundred lifetimes to weave, all figured over with images of the ocean: fish and water snakes, whales, monsters, squids and octopi, mantas and eels. On that rug, sitting square in the middle of a blossom of orange light that rained in from a rose window high overhead, sat the most beautiful woman I have _ever _seen.

She was slim, and white as the moon, porcelain pale, her alabaster blond hair all piled up on top of her head in a sleek bun, tiny accent braids criss crossing her head and hanging in loops pinned with diamonds and moonstones. Her eyes were golden and warm like the inside of an egg yolk, and she was wearing an impossibly long, drapey summoner's style robe, crisscrossed by ribbons and trailers and hanging so it left her round little shoulders bare. The bindi dot on her forehead seemed to be a real diamond, held there by close-knit flesh. Her lashes were long and dark and there almost seemed to be golden _glow _coming from under that beautiful milk white skin, but maybe that was just a side-effect of the very soft light of the cathedral's interior.

I took a step forward, slowly, reverently. I hate Yevon. This was _not _Yevon. This _could not _be Yevon. It was too _good_. It was too _beautiful_, and I was again _achingly sad_, as I had been before, at the top of those horrible stairs.

Life. They want to _live_. In the land of death and the dead, it was what we all wanted.

As I moved, she turned her face to look at me, and she smiled and I was bathed by a warm light that started in the wiggle of my toes and then waltzed slowly, all the way up my spine until it somehow emptied out the end of my ponytail singing _Rikku, I love you, you are the best Rikku ever_ all the way home.

"Welcome, Rikku, daughter of Cidolphus," she said softly, and it was like the sweet slide of a clarinet, and I suddenly _knew _the second voice that had been carrying the hymn as if it had been my own. She continued, voice pitched so it danced over the words like music, "Welcome to Indara, Temple of the Summoned Sea."

Her eyes shifted, and she seemed to be looking past me, and I caught the barest flicker of crimson and steel as she spoke again. That old man can _move _when he wants to.

"And welcome, Auron, son of Faris. It is a pleasure to see you again." Her smile was mysterious, unreadable, like she'd stolen all the cookies from the jar and eaten the canary besides. I suddenly desperately wanted to make that smile my own, to understand the _knowing _of it. As if she knew even that, her eyes sloped gently, and she spoke again.

"We have been expecting you."

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabi-hime (gabihime at gmail dot com)**

**Chapter Five: Bluffs Called, Antes Forced**

It's not the kind of thing you ever think you're going to hear -- that you're expected at an affair that can only be matched by down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. It's like I was waiting for Brother to leap out from behind a column and shout _I have been the one to fool you this time, Rikku_, while my Pops slapped his knee and haw-hawed good. It was one of those things I kept expecting to wake up from, like it had been some weird little hallucinogen induced frolic, like I'd had too much pizza before bed and paid for it with nightmares. I _almost _couldn't believe it was happening, like waking up that first morning groggy and wiping the sleep out of my eyes in the middle of a camp on the banks of the Moonflow with Old Reliable sitting there beside the powder-white ashes of the fire, one scarlet bloodstain of a reminder exactly what I'd gotten myself into -- and I heard Yuna quietly singing to her aeons in the morning stillness. _Guardian_. There was Lulu mending her cactuar and the woodfire smoke smell of Wakka cooking sausages over raked embers. _Guardian_. And Tidus teaching Kimahri how to play tic-tac-toe in the dirt with the butt of his spear. _Guardian_. It was true. We were all going to die.

Rikku Cidolphus: Genius Synthsmith, Mechanic, Sharpshooter, Chemist, Physicist, Elementalist, Thief, Treasure Hunter, Detective, Popstar, Heretic, Rebel, Dead Girl Walking -- _Guardian_.

It had been hard to wrap my mind around then, so I'd just gone along chirping, sunshine bright, like I didn't know by heart that you could count the guardians who'd walked away from the final summoning on one hand, like sacrifice was a word my Pops hadn't drilled into my head from the time I was _five _and Braska -- my Uncle Braskie who'd gone to ground without ever having _one _of Rikku's Super-D-Special-heart-heart hugs -- had gone to the Calm Lands to summon himself dead. That day, my name had been Rikku Cidolphus, and the odds were low that I'd ever live to see the flipside of my sixteenth birthday.

Once, a while ago, Auron told me that Spira doesn't have _any _children. It just has tiny adults, old in their shoes. No place where death walks so frequently and so closely could ever claim to properly have _children_. He'd held my chin in his hand and asked me squarely: _Are you ready to die? _I'd said _Sure, boss. Lead the way. Anything for Yunie. I have a deathwish._ Or something like that. _Ed'c dra meddma drehkc dryd kad oui. The Devil's in the details, Rikku._ Thanks, Pops.

Of course, then we'd all gone heretic and killed Yunalesca -- if you can actually kill someone who's already dead and_ has been dead _for a thousand years, give or take. We'd killed the dead hope and now we were trying to stab out our own new pathway in the dark. We were trying to _live_, trying our best to stay alive just one more day, beating hearts and skin intact. Yevon would say we were living without purpose. For me, living is its own purpose.

So now we were set against the temples, if not the fayth, and the path Auron and I had walked together had brought us _here_, in front of this ethereal woman who made me feel plain and skinny and snot-nosed, scabbed knees, flailing arms, and very fifteen besides. I loved her _desperately_. I couldn't help it -- all that shimmer soft blond hair as fair as cornsilk in those tiny little looped braids -- you can put a slug in my head and leave me for the carrion birds if I ever touch _half _that grace, and I'll die fulfilled.

She cocked her head and she was just like that famous smiling painting -- you know the one -- all mysteriousness and elegance and private jokes. Only she was about fifty-jillion times more gorgeous than any old painting, because she was sitting there _right in front of me _and enjoying a joke at my expense, and for some reason I found this to be _the most awesome thing that could have possibly happened to me. _Maybe it was her smile, soft as the arched back of a new kitten, or maybe it was her eyes, a golden glow from birthday candles, or maybe it was all that gossamer light hair, butterfly spun, the color of crystallized honey. Maybe it was _everything_. She was _beautiful_.

Her voice was the same as her shape, as her feel, all soft rounded corners, with a quiet sort of strength that seemed to echo off the walls of the room, buoyed up and carried by the hymn, even to the far corners of the cathedral space. I had the ridiculous but pretty hard to ignore urge to fall to my knees in front of her. I didn't look at Auron. I _couldn't _look at Auron, although she did for some sweet minutes before speaking again.

"I am the lady of this temple, and called by different names on different planes, but always I am the All Holy. I am the frostfire knitting up your bones underskin so it ripples like water. I am not the candleflame that raises from halfdeath. I am the binding thread that knots your skein of fate. Where others unmake, I remake, reforge, reinvent. I am the shattered become whole again. I am the three faces of life, death, and resurrection. You may name me Ashura."

_Ashura, queen, chancegiver, soulweaver, lifeeater, All Holy_. It was all there, whispered soft in the echo of that name. _Ashura._

"You're the fayth," I said stupidly, like I was really gunning to win the Captain Obvious award. Who else would she be? The custodian? I shook my head, trying to get my thoughts in order, "I mean, duh, yeah, you're pretty obviously the fayth, but I didn't think you ever saw anyone but summoners. I thought you all stayed holed up in the chamber of the fayth."

Behind me, half-distracted, as if his mind were somewhere else entirely, I heard the shift of crimson and steel and flipped my braids over my shoulder turning to look at Auron for the first time. Auron Faris. Who knew? As far as I knew, Auron had dropped his last name like a popstar when he'd entered the temple at age negative two or whatever. The-artist-formerly-known-as had unshouldered his nihontou, and now it stood against the lapis tile at his feet, feather soft so it didn't leave a scratch. It occurred to me that Auron is a man of delicate balance. His facial expression gave _absolutely nothing _away. I tell you, the man's a champion poker player.

"There are exceptions," he said mysteriously, one eyebrow with an ever-so-slight dubious cock. I felt like the guest of honor at a Things-Rikku-Doesn't-Know convention.

She laughed and it was soft and sweet like ginger cookies and I couldn't help but feel my eyes roll inexorably back to train on her.

"There are indeed exceptions, Auron of Faris. We haven't see a soul for ten years, not a single soul -- and before that we hadn't seen anyone for time out of mind. When we saw you at the lip of the stairs, we called to you. Even if there wasn't a summoner with you, you were still other souls that we could meet. After so long, it didn't matter who you were. We wanted to speak with you."

"You are alone here," that was Auron again, and strangely, the dubiousness was gone from his voice. In place of it, there was a curious kind of understanding -- but that was _retarded_. How could the Legendary Guardian Esq. be alone? He was the boss of one of the biggest summoner's parties ever, and loved and respected by darn near everyone on Spira. He was a _household name_. You don't get to call yourself _Legendary Guardian_ unless you're _legendary_, _and stuff._ It's in the rules.

Suddenly something hit me between the eyes just as sure and sharp as that cock-eyed thundara that Brother had zapped me with, toddler-era.

"You keep saying _we_. Is that like the royal-boss-important-fayth kind of 'we,' Miss Ashura Queen-ma'am, or is there someone -- "

He cut me off before I could finish what I was saying. It was something I was going to have to get _very used to._

"You will find that it is the very _practical _sort of we."

I was doing a lot of head-whipping and braid flipping today. He was suddenly standing behind Ashura, all tall and too-thin-bony, long-limbed, whiplash lean with corded musculature that stood out along his arms and the inkfire marks of tattoos tracing intricate patterns all over his visible skin. Of his skin, a _lot _of it was visible, since he was only wearing slacks and an open vest to keep him decent, his feet as bare as I suddenly _knew _Ashura's were, as bare as _mine _were. His face was chiseled, slender, almost severe, with a hawksharp nose and thin lips and his hair was thick and short, the very color of the aquamarine of the stones in the floor, swept back from his forehead in a razor fine widow's peak. His eyes were gray-storm-depthless, and he was looking _into _me.

"I am the sea fang who rules the bounding main. I am ageless and timeless and I stop for no man. I am the Prince of Tides. I am the tsunami. In the beginning, all things crawled from the sea, and in the end, all things to there will return. I am _the _tidal wave and the master of this temple," he laid one slim finger tipped with an ivory claw to his lips and a smile built in him like a flood ready to be unleashed, roaring and _so smug_, "I am _Leviathan_, the king of the summons."

_Sea fang. Water's Power. Tsunami. Tidal Wave. _Suddenly it was all serpent slick, and I could feel those goldfish lace fins and whiskers and tusks the color of ivory --

"You're a _guado_."

I was really gunning hard to win the stupidest things ever said to the fayth award.

He raised one eyebrow and responded dry as Bevelle sherry, "Oh, I am? I hadn't noticed."

Behind me, I could just _see _Auron rubbing his temples. Now I don't have to wonder so hard why he'd rather be down here with Lulu. She has better manners _and _thigh highs.

"No," I waved my hands, palms forward, "I mean, that's not what I meant, I mean, so the Guado only joined the church of Yevon with ol' potbelly -- I mean, Maester Seymour's -- daddy brought them all into the fold, right?" I was bouncing from foot to foot in the throes of the itchy dance as I tried to explain myself and avoid offending _the fayth_, "That's gotta be like max twenty-five years ago, but you seem like you've been down here a lot longer than that -- plus I'd think that a guado fayth would've made bigger waves than that, considering what a big to-do there was when daddy-o converted the clan," I panted, letting my breath catch up with me, then leaned forward on my toes, collecting myself for the pounce, "So, considering all that, how is it that there _can even be_ a guado fayth?"

He laid a slender hand against the white of Ashura's neck and stupidly enough I almost felt like rising to challenge. _WTF was going on? _My mind was such a mess that I was falling back into mechanic's short hand, the kind of thing you scribbled in chalk on the side of an engine when it just wouldn't fit back together properly.

Leviathan seemed amused by my confusion and pointed an ivory claw square at my chest, "You are born under my star. It is refreshing to see that. Very few are, you know. Feel privileged," his eyes shifted over my shoulder to rest on Auron, who was as silent and steady as a wall behind me, "You are Yojimbo's, I would think." He paused and they seemed to size each other up, but then he shrugged and it was grace like water in even that simple gesture, "Yes, I think you are certainly Yojimbo's. Just as cheery besides," he turned his attention back to me, "Now, Rikku Cidolphus, you are correct in your thinking that the Guado came into the fold of Yevon exactly twenty four years ago. Before that, they were all," here he paused and gave me what felt like a private smile, "heretics. But the actions and faith of the group at large do not determine the actions and faith of each individual member of that group. I think you might know that well enough yourself, _guardian_."

"I don't think it's the same thing," I started doubtfully.

"Then consider perhaps someone close to you who forsook the path of the Al Bhed and instead sought to become -- "

My brows clouded and I held up my palm in very hand-talking-to-you gesture, "Don't even _talk to me _about him. I'm still _so _mad at him -- "

"Him," Auron's voice was flat and deeply not curious. It made me wonder why he'd said it in the first place. If he didn't care, if he wasn't interested --

"This _boy_," I said contrarily, "We both used to work summers under Rin when we were kids. He was a big jerkus and then went off to_ join the Crusaders _without so much as a _word _to me."

"Oh," was all he said, and I turned briefly to look at him, hands on my hips and still feeling a little sullen. There it was: gold medal in poker face.

"I mean, leaving was one thing, but leaving to _join the Crusaders_? Insult to injury. They're like Yevon's secret police."

"-I- was a crusader."

I rolled my eyes. What a time for a love-can-build-a-bridge-kum-ba-yah-let's-hold-hands-and-settle-our-cultural-differences moment.

"You're _different_," I sighed exasperatedly, "You were raised in the lap of all that Yevon junk, right? Bevelle born and temple raised? You couldn't _not _be brainwashed. You didn't know any better, like you can't really blame a kid for sticking his hand into the fire the _first _time, no matter how dumb it is, because he doesn't know, you see. Gi -- _he _didn't have any excuse, big ol' stupidhead dummy."

"If you consider being a Crusader akin to sticking your hand into the fire, then Auron as he first came to us would have then been baptized by flame," Ashura tittered, hand to her mouth. I turned to look at the two of them again and raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"And what's all this business about 'when Auron first came to us?' Is this like Rikku-Is-Out-Of-The-Loop Variety Hour?"

"I was about to ask the same thing," he said, soft and rough as gravel.

"Somehow I kinda doubt that -- "

"_Rikku_."

"Yeah, I'll be quiet, boss."

So far? Me? Yeah. Batting a thousand.

"Auron of Faris first came to us ten years ago," said Ashura simply, tilting her head slightly so the gemstones in her hair chimed against each other musically.

"With Jecht and Uncle Braska?" I asked, greased lightning. I didn't even wait for a response, just slammed my first into my palm and cried, "HA! I _knew _it was you. It looked too much like you to _not _be you. I knew it. I was so right," Really, I had known it was _not _him because he had told me that it was _not _him and I had believed him _in my bones_, but such things didn't seem all that important at that particular moment, when he stood with his gloved palm raised to ward me off.

He wasn't looking at me, he was looking past me, at _them_.

"I _can't _have been here before," he said, and again his will was so strong I wanted to deny those spheres that I was still carrying around in my pack, to nod sure and sound and say _well, Auron says it, so it must be true_, "I would remember _something _-- "

She extended her hand, smooth like music, and shook her head, "I am afraid it is a little more complicated than that. You were here, and in being here, you became _not _here."

He looked at her dubiously, then his bare arm came slowly unslung out of his gi, like it was a snake in winter, sluggish and careful. He closed his eye as flesh met flesh and something of her grace seemed to briefly light him up inside-out like a Yule tree -- like colored lightswould explain everything, smoke and mirrors and there it is. He drew back as he opened his eye again and then it narrowed.

"I . . . understand."

Well, that was fine and dandy for them, but me? Still mayor of In-the-darksville. I opened my mouth and raised my hand to say something, but Ashura stopped me sure as shooting out my tires by turning her eyes from him to me and then back to him as she slowly shook her head.

"What surprises me," she said softly, the lightest spring in her voice, "Is that you haven't told her."

"Told me what?" I was dancing again like I had ants in my shorts, you know, the stinging, biting kind. The kind that say _hey Rikku, trying to look serious and grown up and secret-hearing worthy? Well TOO BAD, HA HA._

Of course, it wasn't like either of them were paying attention to _me _anyhow.

"It is none of her concern," he said, rough as sandpaper, and there was an edge of something in his voice that I hadn't heard since potbelly had shish-ka-bobbed ol' Kinoc. Anger? Frustration? Rage? Maybe something similar to what I was feeling at being discussed like I wasn't standing_ right there _(dancing right there, at least).

"Oh really?" Ashura asked demurely, "I often find that in such cases it is better that the involved parties -- "

"_She is not involved_," he was quick, sharp as glass and sounded as dangerous. He was _angry_, and I wanted to plant both hands on my hips and declare soundly that yes, I was very involved, even though I didn't know _what _I was involved with, since I had no idea what they were talking about -- but I had been sleeping curled at his back for more than a week now and he hadn't said a _word _to discourage me, and then he'd shoved _pudding _down my throat, so as far as I was concerned? We were lifers, richer or poorer 'til death do us part and all that jazz. You had _better believe_ I was involved.

I felt someone's eye on me, so I looked up and found Leviathan watching me intently, pearl claw to his lips and chuckling silently, like he _knew _what I was thinking. Yunie never said a word about the fayth being able to read minds or anything, but suddenly I couldn't get the picture of Leviathan wearing a pink can-can dress and doing the watusi out of my head and both of his eyebrows raised and I could almost _hear _him say _really, pink is more Bahamut's color_. His mouth quirked, then he shifted his attention back to Ashura.

"Mmm," she murmured, sweet and musky as tea, "Then perhaps I read the situation improperly."

Her eyes were on me suddenly, heavy and soft like a thirty pound cat, and I blushed even though I had _no reason_ to blush, like I'd been getting my weekend jollies out behind the bike sheds and I'd been caught by my grandma or something -- except Gramma Kettie wouldn't have given an auroch's patout.

"Then perhaps you _did_," the way he said it, there was no _perhaps _about it.

Okay, enough was enough.

"If _somebody _doesn't start telling me what you're talking about, then I'm going to start reading _everyone's _situations improperly with my pistol."

I never stopped to think that maybe it wasn't the _best _idea to go waving my gun around at the fayth.

Ashura raised her pale sculpted eyebrows and glanced over her shoulder to share a look with Leviathan, "Yes, she's definitely one of yours."

Leviathan? Pleased as punch, like a daddy at his first ballet recital when his little girl is the sugar plum fairy or something. One side of his face was quirked up and his smugness quotient? Blew Auron's _out of the water_I guess that's what it means to be fayth. You win all your confrontations.

"Rikku Cidolphus is correct. She became involved the moment you accepted responsibility and sole ownership of her right leg."

Oh, not _that _again. Could no one pick a _good time _to bring that up?

"That was jest," I could hear the point of his sword digging against the aquamarine of the tile. He was out of balance, "That was a _game_."

This time the pearl claw was pointed square at Auron, "You accepted responsibility for roughly twenty percent of her person, did you not? She is involved. By the old laws, she has rights to know. There is a legal, binding contract."

My eyes rounded hugely as I followed the ball back and forth, racket to racket. Ashura was watching their exchange with some interest, then she turned to me and confided softly, "In Zanarkand, he was a civil attorney."

"A _guado attorney?_"

"You know, I'm beginning to think that you might be _slightly prejudiced _towards the guado."

Indara's Leviathan: my sea serpent lawyer.

There was a rattle of paper and suddenly Professor One-Eye was holding out what I immediately recognized as a smooth cornered piece of paper -- Rin's stationary -- my I.O.U.

"This is not a legal, binding contract," he argued, eyes narrow, "This is a thoughtless child's scribble. _I renounce my claim on her leg, she can have it back._"

Oh, he was just _asking _for a knuckle sandwich. 'Thoughtless child' my sandy desert butt. What happened to 'Spira has no children'? Only when it was convenient to him, I guess. I launched forward on my feet and brought my finger to bear right under his nose, "Well, I don't want it back. I _unrenounce _your claim."

"Sworn and witnessed," said Leviathan calmly, reminding me he was at my back. Auron and I both turned to look at him and I was a little dazed.

"Sworn and witnessed," he repeated, folding his arms comfortably across his chest, "By the fayth. Auron Faris, you have legal custody of twenty percent of Rikku Cidolphus's person. She has rights to know."

"Only twenty percent of rights to know," pointed out Ashura, giggling softly. Oh yeah, this was a laugh-riot. I had just given up permanent custody of my right leg at the drop of a hat, sworn and witnessed by the fayth of a religion that'd probably like to burn me and my entire family (Yunie excepted) at the stake and all for the chance at knowing part of a secret kept by a guy twenty years my senior whose name was not spelled R-I-N. My life-decisions today? Not the best ones, I think.

"Then she shall have twenty percent of the secret," Leviathan decreed indulgently, judge, jury, and executioner as he waved one idle hand in Auron's direction.

I wheeled to face Auron, ready for his rebuke that was sure to feature phrases like 'thoughtless child,' 'irresponsibility,' and possibly other lifetime favorites like 'culpability' and the lack thereof. But he wasn't poised with his defense, like I expected him to be. He was standing and staring, like he was frozen, freeze dried, and his sunglasses had somehow slipped down his nose, exposing his one rust-colored eye that was all snow-blue, too much white showing, his pupil and iris just a pinprick in that sea, like he was having some kind of attack -- heart attack or spleen attack, or something, I'm no medic -- and I was about to shout his name, to cross to his side, _something_, because all that white was just _too chilling_ --

And that's when I saw the first one.

It was smoke and fairy lights again, this time from behind his elbow, and my mind was swimming and I thought I might be seeing stars, but then there was another, and another, lemon yellow, pistachio green, petal pink, light and color and nothing, soulstuff, fiendstuff, _pyreflies_, all circling around him like carrion birds, like carrion flies, and he was a corpse, he was a dead man walking, and it _couldn't be true,_ not Auron, not the Rock of Mi'hen, not my horrible poker partner, the man I -- and suddenly I knew why he'd sat with me on the lip of the farplane and listened to my mind wander out loud on the nature of the soul, why he'd seemed so indrawn, he hadn't been mourning someone, he'd been mourning _himself_. He was Yunalesca, he was Mika, not the _rebel_, he was dead and rotten just like everything in Spira, expired, past due date, still burning the blue lights of pyreflies, fiendeyes reflecting the light, and _cred _I'd thought and I'd wanted and no sticky little kids with eyes the color of potatoes all bent back on themselves like a spiral -- and what was left of him was now spinning away in front of me, deathspiral, like confetti, or like the glitter in one of those chintzy little blitzball globes they sell in Luca, and he was frozen in time, so cold, cold as death like he'd always been, and I couldn't stand it anymore, couldn't stand a thing --

"_Make it stop_," I sobbed, doubling over, my body heaving and bunching, seizing up, muscles jerking like they were pulled by marionette strings, and somewhere in the saltwater blur at the corners of my vision as I hacked and coughed and sobbed, I saw the fairylights spin up into him again, and he was whole, and he slumped against his sword, like his spine was jelly_nothing_ -- Legendary Guardian -- and I couldn't stop it, it was all slick slime bile in my throat, burning up my nose and I was heaving, heaving so hard, doubled over, sobbing as I vomited all over that ancient tapestry rug, vomited like one of those buttress fountains endlessly spitting up water, heartsick, soulsick, my eyes gummed up with salt tears, sticking my lashes shut, gluing my whole head wrong. I was breathing half-crazy, my heart hammering in my head and I felt like I might throw that up too -- my heart and my soul, and I stood up shakily, still dripping tears or vomit or bile or snot and I shook my head so hard my ears rang.

"_I hate you,_" I half screamed, mad and delirious on the hurt that was burning me up inside like poison. _That man_, I would've -- _for that man_ --

And then he turned and walked away.

------

Whew. Despite being trapped far away from home and stuck in a living hell while suffering from the flu, I managed to get this done for you guys. I know this is probably not the cliffhanger you wanted, but the next chapter will be coming, maybe when my fever comes back down.

Love to everyone who reviews. You guys keep me going, a light when all other lights have been extinguished. Also thanks to Azriel's Daughter, who's the reason you guys got this chapter today and not next week some time.

Tilda, underscore, tilda. My head hurts.

::exits::

Love,

Gabs


	7. Chapter Six: The Burn Card in my Pocket

Sometimes fate lines you up, knocks your legs apart, bends you over, and kicks you square in the _business_. I don't think I really need to underline for you that this was really one of those times for Rikku J. Cidolphus. Don't ask me what the J stands for, because I'm not going to tell you. I'm sure as heck not going to tell you now, because I'm kind of too busy sitting on the floor by a puddle of my own vomit and crying my eyes out about my -- my -- my _Auron _who I just found out is deader than Maester Mika's sexlife. I kind of wanted to break something. I kind of wanted to break something over someone's head -- maybe Auron's. It's maybe one of those times when domestic violence is okay -- when you've just found out your boyfriend is _dead_.

At that point, I kind of hated _everything_, you know, the way you do when you're fourteen and your dad's just taken your speeder skiff away from you because you totally crashed it into some nuns _accidentally _when you were _accidentally _flying low through Bevelle and had just gotten lost or something and weren't trying to make some big rebellious statement about youth and freedom and will and _stick that in your peace pipe and smoke it, tubbo-Kinoc _-- not that I have any kind of personal experience with that sort of thing or anything. But it was _that _kind of hating: blind and pulpy and poison and tight like I was crushing a can under my foot and it had sawn off edges that were eating through the sole of my boot, except I was too stubborn and too mad to do anything but keep grinding my foot down into the razor-hurt. It was also really self-centered, but I was going to need someone else to point that out to me.

Back before, you know, before _everything_, I had never thought that anything could break me. I was king of the world, or princess at least, and even when dread crawled into my belly and the dark burned my eyes sightless like white fire it didn't _break _me, it just sort of wore me down slowly, like sanding off the burrs on a crank shaft so everything'll turn smoothly. If you had asked me, I'd have said _No way bosco. Nothing on this earth can break Rikku Cidolphus. Us Al Bhed are made of stronger stuff than that!_ And maybe that was just me whistling in the dark, and maybe I some kind of understand that now, understand what it was that made Pops get all hollow-eyed on some nights when he'd look over the desert or up at the cloudy sky, when it sounded like gravel rolling around in the back of his throat, but I knew. I guess I always knew. You'd think the world would have had enough of silly love songs -- or you think by now maybe people'd have gotten tired of all the hurt and the pain and the mess that two people make when they try to understand one another, like we're all made of broken glass, just scraping and scratching furrows into one another when we try to get close.

It hurt, and it hurt bad, mama, and all I could do was sit there because I was _broken_. Rikku J. having taken a sledgehammer to the brain, can only moan and twitch. I thought I was better than that. Maybe nobody is. Maybe that's good, too.

After a while I guess I'd sobbed all my sobs out because I couldn't cry any more, and I just wrapped myself up in my arms, elbows and knees and bony joints, toes curled under and bent against the stone as if _that _hurt, as if _that _pain could numb my mind and maybe make me forget the _other pain_. I cried until I was raw and sore and I'd bruised my knuckles against the stone trying to beat the hurt out of myself. I hated him and I hated me for hating him. After what we'd been through, the dark and the pudding and the sleeping and the way he smelled and the way he smiled and I hated him because I loved him and he was _dead_.

"I never expected you to be a coward."

It was Leviathan, and he was standing on the rug beside my puddle of vomit, examining it as if he found it very interesting. I dunno if you can kill the fayth -- I mean really permanently K.O. the jerks -- but if you can, I don't think anyone ever wanted to more in the entire world than I did at that moment. Zero to sixty in five point two, and I _must _be part desert hare, because I went from curled up in a hurt little ball to tackling that SOB before he could react, and us being of about the same body mass, I took him down in one go, me on top of him, palms flat across his chest and pushing in like I thought I could collapse his ribcage from pure spite.

_"I am not a coward,_" I was yelling, rage and spittle, like it was all his fault, and maybe some part of me thought it was, then. It was the blame game. _Your _fault, _his _fault, _their _fault, not _my _fault.

Leviathan didn't seem to be all that worried about me sitting on his chest and beating him ineffectually with my bruised and bloody little fists, and I was almost wishing I had thought to beg back Deus Ex before coming into this place, but then he was talking again, like he really enjoyed the sound of his voice and I was forced to listen, because the fayth? They do that to you.

"If you're not a coward, then why don't you prove it and face your dragon."

"My dragon is a horrible old man in a dusty old overcoat and he's _dead_," I shouted, and I pushed him back against the stone for emphasis. I don't know who I thought I was helping, wailing on the fayth, and I can't even say that it was making me feel better, because it wasn't. Sometimes you do things just to do them, so you won't have to _think_.

He grinned and it was like an eel opening its mouth, too many teeth to fit in there properly, fangs all ivory and ancient yellow. It was a handful of knives and razorblades all for me, courtesy of him.

"As are we all," he said cryptically, and then he smiled, smug and self-assured like he knew so much that I didn't, ancient mysteries lost to the world, and I punched the floor again and threw myself off of him, turning away so I wouldn't have to see him, all that aquamarine and blue that seemed to be needling deep inside me. _Get out. You don't know me. That's not who I am. Who gave you the right --_

"What has changed, Rikku Cidolphus?"

That was _her_, Ashura, the queen, and I had to turn and look at her when she spoke, raindrops in the ocean or a spoon in hot chocolate, stirring me up, turning me around, calming my hurt like there was the light trip magic of an esuna knitting my soul and spine together again. She was still _so beautiful_. Leviathan had gotten up off of the floor and out of my vomit. Boy, I really know how to treat the fayth right. No wonder they only come out to see summoners. I closed my eyes as hard as I could, the salt gritty on my face, and I tried not to think.

"What is it that has changed?" She asked again, quite, slow, and curious, and after a while I opened my eyes and looked at the stone, deep blue reflecting orange glow, and I looked at my dirty scraped little feet.

"_Everything_," I said, shaking my head so that the beads rattled against one another and I kicked the ball of my foot against the floor, "_Everything _has changed."

"You don't really think that," she said, after a slow moment fell between us, "You think that you're supposed to think that, but you don't really want to think that, do you?"

I didn't say anything, but then her voice was light and soft, curling into me and around me, the warm breeze of holy cure.

"Do you know how people get fairy tales and happily-ever-afters, Princess Aurora Rikku Cidolphus?" She was serious and laughing all at once, like golden flowers in a field, and Leviathan had gone to stand behind her, slender fingers in the hollow of her collar bone.

"They make them."

Maybe I was choking and maybe I was drowning and maybe I'd finally found the shore.

"You should go to him," she said.

And I did.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabihime (gabihime at gmail dot com)**

**Chapter Six: The Burn Card in my Pocket**

In the end, I guess it's one thing to sit all sobby and teary-eyed and have the fayth point one slender finger out towards the red sky sunset-dawn and say _Go to him_, kind of like a rumbling-thunder-voice-from-the-clouds sort of thing that you can't ignore, and then it's a whole different thing once you've made it from the going to the gone and are standing there feeling old and hollow and staring at his ancient red back.

It's a hard thing to explain to someone else, and maybe that's why some people never bother trying. After all, I couldn't exactly say _Aww shucks Auron, I didn't really mean it when I screamed that I hated you,_ because I had. I'd meant it desperately with every little cord and bump of my being -- and he'd know that I had meant it, knew it right now, knew that before he'd turned his back on me, I'd turned my back on him. Some great show of solidarity there, Rikku. They should give you the blue ribbon for loyalty in the face of extreme hardship. You just don't do that to . . . people . . . that you care about. Auron, that I --

I couldn't say "I didn't mean it when I said that I hated you!" and hand over a dozen roses and a case of beer and hoped that smoothed the sand because I _had _meant it, and I hadn't thought of anything other than the hate, because I'd been hurt so hard and not expecting it. Half of it was pain and maybe two thirds of it was shock, and I hadn't given myself any time to think or even really feel. I had just reeled, like a chocobo cart going around a corner on two wheels. I had hated him then, but what I'd realized when Ashura had served it up to me blue plate special style is that I loved him more than I hated him.

I told you it was a hard thing to explain to another person. Maybe what I'd realized was that all that storming I'd done before was just crying over spilt milk. Sure it was not the greatest situation I could think of, finding out that he was a dead man walking, but like my Pops always says: _Oui meja dra pacd oui lyh. _You play the hand you're dealt. It's your responsibility to the world and a payback for having been given the chance to live in it. Sure, everybody gets bad cards, and sometimes the cards you get make you scream and cry and throw things and beat your fists bloody against the wall, but you can't give up playing just because you don't like the hand you've got. Maybe nobody likes the hand they've got, not really, and we're all just pretending sunshine and daffodils to ward off the dark. Maybe that's okay too.

The fact that he was now grade A dead-as-a-doorknob didn't change who Auron was -- just like if he really died tomorrow forever-and-ever I wouldn't stop loving that great big idiot just because we put him in the ground and said the last words over him. It wasn't something that my Pops was going to be real excited about, although not for the reasons you might think. He always said that the purest flame always burns the hottest and by association can always burn you the worst, but there was no use in saying _Rikku, don't you get involved. You're going to get hurt_, because if that wasn't shutting the doors to the stable after the Chocobo had already gone then I don't know what is. Maybe it would have been easier on me if I hadn't loved him so horribly-terribly that it made my insides feel sick and slick like Mandragora mash, but then maybe it wouldn't have been. Pops lost Mama a long time ago, but I don't think he's ever wished he hadn't seen her standing there. Wishing away something like that? When you start doing that I think you're _really _broken. Maybe not even a sledgehammer blow between the ears can knock the stars out of my eyes. Maybe that's why he loved me.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself again. Sure, I knew that he loved me right then -- even if he didn't know it yet, but I guess a girl kind of knows things like that. It's not something you really need anybody to tell you, like you don't need to have going to the bathroom explained to you. But we're still a long way from kiss and make up, right? I'd just kicked him in the head when he was down, and now I was standing behind him shy and strange, shifting from one foot to the other and wondering what it was you said to a dead man.

_Deepest sympathies for your loss and many happy returns. Sorry you kicked the bucket, I still like you, love Rikku. Being stiff is terrif! Don't let the rigor mortis get you down!_

They should make greeting cards for this sort of thing. It would make it a lot less messy.

He was sitting on the lip of the promontory, between a dragon-eel and some sort of ancient whale with a single curving tusk where he'd hung his nog bottle. His legs dropped off the side, and his nihontou was wedged behind him somehow, giving him some sort of handhold in case he slipped. Above us and all around us the water was coming down, although we sat back a little, protected from everything but the fine rainbow spray of mist that it kicked up as it torrented by. The light from the sky and the sea colored us both a melon orange, and I could see the little droplets of water starting to collect in his hair: soot and ash dark with silver at the temples. He still had my shoes and socks slung over one shoulder.

I had to scrabble to get where he was, and I ended up half draped over the dragon eel he was leaning against, my chin tucked over the line of spines that raced down his back, a fist full of fang to keep me balanced. He didn't look up. I guess I deserved that, or maybe he thought that he _didn't _deserve it. People are funny people. My Pops always used to say that.

"Now you know," was what he said, and I could see that he'd taken those ever-present sunglasses off and shoved into some interior pocket or maybe pitched them into the sea. His collar was hanging loose where he'd undone the buckles. He looked -- not exactly ragged, my Auron never looks ragged. There's too much piss and spite in him, too much pride. He did look a little tired though, tired and set, like he already knew everything that I was going to say, had played everything out in his mind already, had prepared himself for what was coming. I'd already screamed that I hated him. I guess it doesn't get a lot worse than that.

"That your name's Auron Faris? Yeah, it was quite a shocker."

"_Rikku._" It was sharp, burnt, and cut off, and I would have put my hands on my hips if I hadn't been so busy holding on for dear life.

"I know what you're thinking," I said, because I thought I did even if I didn't, "But if now's not the time for a good laugh, I dunno when is." I let out a tired little sound and dug in harder, "So you're dead? Wakka is a Yevonite in parachute pants, and I somehow managed to get over that. I'll forgive you for being dead so long as you forgive me for being such a dope."

"You over simplify things," he said, and rubbed his forehead with his gloved hand, all worn black leather smelling of the world gone past us both.

"You over complicate them," I railed back so hard that I lost my handhold and was about to go spilling into the tangerine briney deep when he seized me by my ribbons and shirt collar and dragged me back onto even ground and mostly into his lap. It was a little cramped, there between the eel and the whale, but after a little wiggling I managed to settle in, hands folded across my lap, and look out over the sea like he was doing.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked, like a third-grader trying her hand at psychoanalysis.

"No," was all he said, short and flat, and I was still trying to think of something to say to that when he went on, "But I will. You've earned that."

I curled my toes and waited, and after a long while of just listening to the steam and pitch of the water, he started.

"We've been to Zanarkand," he stopped a moment before starting again, "Together. You saw Yunalesca. You heard the travesty of summoners and Sin."

"Pretty much fit in with my idea of Yevon, yeah."

"I survived Braska's final summoning. I survived Jecht becoming Sin," his voice was tight and old, gravelly, deep like a mine shaft and chained down by hurt and guilt that he was still fighting so hard to control that I might've not seen it if I hadn't developed a practiced eye for catching his flicker-cast moods. "When Sin killed Braska, he left me alive. Can you imagine that? Sin killing everyone, killing Yuna who you swore to protect, and then leaving you alive, burnt up with death, but still alive, and _to no purpose _-- "

"It wasn't right," I balled up my bloody fists, "Nothing was right. You couldn't let it be that way, could you? You had to try and change it. You had to try and shove a stick through the spokes. Just one man trying to change a thousand years of the way the world has decided to be." I stopped and got very quiet as I suddenly realized, "You went back to fight Yunalesca. Alone." I couldn't help myself, and I reached up to touch that ugly scar that seams his face like a fault through granite, like a morbid little kid that's just got to poke a dead cat to _make sure that it's dead_, "And she gave you that, but that wasn't all, was it? She killed you."

"I made it all the way back to Gagazet," he said, and I wondered if I'd hurt his pride.

"You went to fight crazy, freaky, snake lady Yunalesca alone in Zanarkand," I repeated, because it wasn't quite parsing right. And then I laughed and I laughed and I _laughed_, like I was a reject from the Bikanel Home for Disturbed Youth, "Are you sure you're not Al Bhed? Even if you're not, I'm making you an honorary Al Bhed right now," I laid my head against his shoulder and continued to cackle like I was one of the mentally unstable, "Bringing down religion all by yourself. It definitely _sounds _like you. I gotta respect your heresy, Legendary Guardian Dummy."

But then he'd grabbed me hard by one shoulder and turned me around to look at him, that one eye dark as basalt.

"How was the world changed? It hasn't. I _failed._ Nothing has changed. _Nothing._ I exist only so that the mistakes of the past will not be repeated.He was angry.

Now I was getting mad.

"Don't be a coward," I shouted back at him, hearing Leviathan in myself before I could stop it, "You live in this world, so accept it. Don't give me that crap about your story being over. It's only over because you're running from it. You said that all the fayth wanted was to live, but I don't think you want to live because you're afraid of it. You got hurt too much before, so you think it's better to hide in your excuses. This is your story too, you great big moron. You're in it so that makes it your story. Stop wallowing. Braska died and you tried to stop it but you couldn't do anything about it. Just because you messed up once doesn't mean you'll mess up everything, and it doesn't mean that you have the right to hide in a corner afraid of failure. Life is crappy and lame sometimes, but giving up isn't a solution to anything." I was frowning. Frowns don't really look that good on me.

"Not too long ago, someone important to me said that we had two choices: to be happy in death, or to live and keep fighting every day of our lives. Why don't you try fighting? Fighting is more than just slicing fiends into lunchmeat, you know. It's _being happy_. It's being happy that you're alive. It's _living _and not just _being_."

"_I'm__not alive_." Sometimes I think he tries his hardest to miss the point on purpose.

"You're here sitting with me right now, aren't you? We're looking at the sky and looking at the ocean, and after a while we'll get up and have to eat and have to sleep, and you hurt, and you love, and you bleed, and that's enough for me. You've got to _believe _as hard as you can. Believe in _hope_. Believe in _possibilities_."

He made a dark noise that might have been a snort, "A sermon from Maester Rikku?"

"Hey, just because I don't have faith in Yevon doesn't mean I don't have _faith," _I retortedWhat is it that makes us different?" I asked, fist full of his open collar and shaking it so that the buckles rattled against one another and he sounded like a sock full of gil. He seemed to think about what I'd said for some minutes, but then he finally spoke.

"I can think of one difference."

"Yeah?" I asked, challenging.

"You're absolutely certifiably insane."

First I cold clocked him with the butt of my pistol.

Then I kissed him.

This is the moment you've all been waiting for right? It was the moment I was waiting for, I guess, and then it was there and it was all tongue and teeth and dragging on that collar, and his hand at the back of my neck, and the other one holding onto a buttress so we didn't both go spilling off into the boiling ocean. He tasted something like whiskey because maybe he'd been drinking, and I probably tasted like vomit, because that's what I'd been doing, and I don't think a lot of thought really went into it happening. It was mostly just: _well, there it is._

"You'd better believe it," I whooped, and I was still high as a kite. In this world you have to take your ups when you get them and ride them all the way down into the dirt.

"You shouldn't," was what he said, some kind of warning against getting involved with him, like _now _was the time for that -- but I was already scrambling up, scrambling over the eel, bare feet against crystal teeth and tusks, and my tongue was out.

"I_ already did_."

And I guess he couldn't argue with that.

Back in the temple we found Leviathan lounging on the rug near the puddle of vomit, which I found to my deep embarrassment was still right where I'd barfed it. Really, I dunno what I was expecting. The fayth here didn't have any priests to attend to them, and I don't really think cleaning up mortal filth is something that's penciled in as part of the fayths' job description. Leviathan seemed really impressed with it, for lack of a better word, like it was a prized new object d'Art and part of the permanent decor.

"I haven't seen vomit in such a long time," he explained wistfully as he stretched, all the bones in his sternum in crisp relief, fine, like chiseled stone, and then stood. I guess they were pretty strapped for entertainment if a puddle of upchuck could hold their attention. If I hadn't believed them before about being lonely, I sure as heck did now.

"I see you've reconciled," he offered us a brisk wave off with his pearl-clawed hand, "As I expected."

Old Red snorted again and I don't think I really have to tell you that it was the second time that day that I wanted to break sissy goldfish snake's glass jaw. Before I could say anything Ashura had come up behind him and laid her cheek against his shoulder, smiling faintly. She didn't have to say it for me to hear her.

_You must forgive him, but he can't help being the way he is._

Coming from her I sort of had to forgive him, so I did, but I was keeping a tally in my head should Ashura one day come up to me light as a fairy and say _Please school Leviathan for me? Thank you everso._ I wasn't afraid of him. He had _lacy fins_. That is totally twelve parts girly and one big ol' extra helping of _I am a princess_.

Ashura was giggling again, light as sleigh bells coming down Gagazet, but Leviathan had fixed his sea-dark eyes on me again.

"Now we will get to business, Rikku Cidolphus, Auron Faris," he said, folding his long, lean arms over his chest, "You came to Indara for the Fayth. To receive the fayth, you must first meet our challenge."

"Consider it done!" I said, beating my fist into my open palm. I told you, high as a kite.

"_Rikku_."

"Sworn and witnessed," It was gentle and light, this time Ashura had caught me in a net, and I looked more than a little sheepish as I turned around to face Auron, who was again dark and collected in that big bloodstain of a coat of his. I shrugged and tried to look on the brighter side of life.

"Come on, chief. How hard can their challenge be? I mean, okay, another little delay and then we'll bring Yuna her new aeons in style!"

Auron didn't really look convinced, but he shouldered his blade silently and then tapped it over his shoulder once or twice. He was thinking.

"Name your terms, Fayth of Indara."

You'd better believe Auron's got style. Maybe more style than Rin, and that's saying something.

"To receive the Fayth of Indara you must best us both in open combat. Should you fail, you will not lose your lives, but your time in the caverns of Indara will be wiped and neither of you will remember what has passed here, because it will cease to be," stated Leviathan crisply, the sea-dark storm on the horizon.

"Such is our mercy to you, and also your curse," and that was Ashura, a spill of moonglow gold and the faint music of diamonds in her hair.

"Such was their mercy to Jecht and Braska," Auron snapped, and then turned away from the sea snake and his lady.

I gritted my eyes shut as I finally realized.

"Such was their mercy to _you_."

----

After basically an ENTIRE YEAR I brought you a new chapter. I hope it's worth it kids, and lets hope the next one will come out a little sooner.

Thanks terribly for all your support. I haven't stopped writing, but in the last year I've been focusing on my original fiction. You know. Things I Can Get Paid for. I'm sorry I left you out in the cold so long, but a girl's gotta eat.

Love lots,

Gabi


	8. Chapter Seven: Drawing Dead

The only thing that might make a lecture _slightly _more palatable is if you hear it after you've stuffed yourself on fresh melon and blueberry pancakes dredged in syrup after a famine of not so much tough jerky and a little too much soupy warm pudding. That still doesn't make getting lectured by the Grim Creep-er a fun time experience to tell all your friends about, but at least while he drones on and on you can kind of zone out and think about the one true love of blueberries plus pancake batter and maybe lick the last few drops of syrup off your fingers. Where had I gotten this holiest of holy meals? Ashura had _summoned it _for me. Really. No joke.

A little after I'd stirred groggily from my little nest in one of the chancels of the temple that morning, I'd staggered into the main cathedral to find Auron sitting on a stool that had come from _who knows where_, sipping at a steaming mug full of what could only be coffee and looking deeply contented as only a man who has just recently been reunited with his caffeine can manage. This was obviously something I had to investigate, especially after I spied the empty miso bowl carefully set aside at his feet.

Then the golden queen had come fluttering in, moonshine and sunshine and frosted glass warm by the fire, and she'd asked me _Rikku-child, what would you like most in the world for breakfast?_

Naturally, I'd said _A stack of blueberry pancakes higher than a blitzball, slathered in butter and warm syrup. Oh, oh, or fresh melon._ Because, well, that's just ambrosia there. If any of that farplane junk is real at all? _That's _what they're eating.

So I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and a lecture from Ol' Deep Dread for brunch. Well, you can't win 'em all, even with luck like mine. Maybe especially with luck like mine.

"Rikku," he said shortly, and it was one of those _are you listening to me _moments that disciplinarian types sometimes ask just to hear themselves talk. They know you're not listening when they ask in the first place, but they go on and ask anyway, and boy do they ever get mad when you answer _truthfully_.

"Rikku," he said again, looking a little more cross at the corners of his mouth, "Are you listening to me?"

"Completely and totally!" I assured cheerfully, which was a lie, and we both knew it. He struck his sword in the black sand and turned away from me.

"You don't seem to grasp the severity of the situation," he said darkly, and I shrugged.

"Look, I told you that we'll be able to handle it," I answered from the stone where I was putting a new and keener edge on Deus Ex (my very _precious _who had been only just returned to me), "I know you lost before, with Jecht et cetera, but I think we're in much better shape to win than you guys ever were."

"Is that so?" he asked, and I could just barely tell that around the anger that he was feigning he was also faintly amused. Well he should be. Personally I think I'm a laugh-riot.

"Yeah," I answered, then began to explain my thinking helpfully, "See, that was you ten years ago, so you must've learned _something _useful since then, so you're already better than you were the first time you came. And me? I am totally better than Jecht. Way and entirely prettier too. Don't think about selling me short! I'm totally as good as the rest of the party _put together_. I'm _versatile_. I bet I beat my Uncle Braska out double or nothing. He was a great guy and everything, but he was Yunie's pops, which means I bet he hit about as hard as a four year old trying to knock you over with a sack full of warm porridge, which is mostly gross more than anything, now that I think about it."

"He was a _summoner _with almost a full compliment of _aeons_," he interrupted, but I shrugged, palms upward, like I was wishing for more blueberry pancakes to spawn right then and there.

"Really, I'm starting to think summoners are overrated! We've been doing fine!"

He made a sound in the back of his throat, disgruntled and long suffering, and then turned his attention back to me with that one rusty eye.

"He is the Sea Fang," he interrupted, as if I'd somehow managed to forget that singular fact since yesterday, "He is the elemental of water."

"Yeah?" I said. What did he want me to do, give him the cleverness award for thinking that one up? He sure wasn't the elemental of potted meat or anything. I think we'd have _known _if he was.

"If we are to stand a chance of beating him, we will need black magic," he stated plainly, "You insist that you were versatile. Very well. We lack a black mage. You will therefore take on those responsibilities."

"Wait," I squawked, slip-sliding off my stone so fast I staggered in the sand, "You don't mean -- "

"I do," he answered, like he was taking me to the most awful chapel ever.

"Thunder."

"Thundara," he corrected.

"_Thundaga_," I whimpered.

And then I think I fainted.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabihime (gabihime at gmail dot com)**

**Chapter Seven: Drawing Dead Against the House**

I didn't really faint, so you know, but it was what you might call a rude awakening. Saying that you're all that and a bag of gyshal greens is one thing. Living up to it -- living up to it when the package deal includes _thunder_?

Well, of course the first thing I said was _Why don't you be the black mage instead? We'll get you some thigh-highs and a dolly and you'll fit right in!_ And then he just gave me this look that might've leveled Bevelle by itself. It was a look that said_ Rikku, our positions in this party are not up for discussion _and then sort of silently warned around the edges _continue bringing it up and I will turn you over my knee._ I didn't dwell too much on that last bit because I wasn't exactly sure if I was reviled or interested. Or you know, reviled that I was interested. Sometimes it's great to keep Auron under the gun _just to see what he'll do._

Anyway, he made it abundantly clear that I wasn't off the hook until I'd gotten my girl guide merit badges for zap, crackle, pop, and in the end there's really no arguing with him. He's like a donkey made of concrete and trimmed in lead. You know, _that _kind of stubborn. So even though I was looking forward to learning the positives and negatives of electron jimmying about the same as I would've been wishing for a years worth of pin-ups of Maester Jyscal, I kinda figured I had two choices: one -- learn the thunder spells; two -- learn the thunder spells _fast_. Apparently Auron agreed with me, because the first thing he said after his angry eyebrow lecture was _We're going hunting._

And hot diggety, did we _ever._ He might has well have stood there at the lip of the corridor, feet sinking in the shining black sand and shrugged his gi off one shoulder as he said _this shall be your education_, because that's what it was. I mean, don't get me wrong. I know how to kill fiends. It's not a subject you can fail on your placement tests on when your pops thinks a fun family outing is exploring infested broken down ancient ruins, and you have clearly inherited his sense of adventure (which Captain Bloodspot seems to like to refer to as _recklessness_) wholecloth. So I know how to feel out fiends and snag the last bits of their memories before someone else gently sends them with a skull crushing blitzball impact or a smoke boiling fira, and I know how to scratch 'em up myself. My pops didn't raise any little girl who couldn't pull her own weight.

But pulling your own weight among six other people who are apparently among the most brilliant fiend hunters on the planet and pulling your weight when it's only you and Judge Red? Those two things are not the same animal. See, when it was all of us together: King Goof Tidus and Yunie and Wakka and Lulu and Kimahri and Old Red _and _me, it's almost like there aren't enough fiends to go around, and my special services get called in when there are machina to dismantle on the fly or Tidus, Wakka, and I have to take a deep dive because apparently _no one else can swim._ On a planet that's ninety percent water and where the quickest way to get from point a to point b is sea travel, only the blitzballers and the Al Bhed bother to learn. Go figure. Maybe swimming is up there on the incomprehensible list of things that Yevon finds a great sin, in between using machina and having good fashion sense. _ I just bet you_.

Anyway, so when everyone's together, things are different (hello understatement of the year -- but right now I'm not talking about the cuddling Big Red scenario). I pull my own weight, for sure, but being as there're so many of us yanking on the rope, there's less weight to pull. Now that's a lesson in physics that even Tidus could understand. So a lot of the time I can't even get to fiends, even running so hard that my observably lovely calves are pushed into overdrive, before there's a shower of flare or holy or ultima or a blitzball pounding things to powder before I get close. Sometimes it makes me feel just _slightly useless_, but then I remember that they really keep me around not for my ability to sink my fingers into fiendflesh and drag out ethers and things, but rather for my award-winning and much-lauded personality. It just must be _completely _and _totally _depressing for everyone back with Yunie to start their days out with a heaping spoonful of Rikku goodness. That's what I'm telling myself at least.

But with Dark and Smug? There was no one else to catch the slack of the line when he threw it out over his shoulder, feet light in those cold stone heavy boots and we danced the _paso doble_ of fiendkills, his great sword singing through the air, keen and keen, piercing the shells of adamantoises so I could get to the soft flesh underneath or pinning a mimic to the ground when a chest turned out to be a gobbler. And then there was me, light on my feet and learning when to draw and shoot and when to tear across that space like fire and jump to hit the varunas and float-eyes that were just too silver quick for the singing death of the muramasa, my claw shredding up flesh and nothing until pyreflies exploded, and after a while I even stopped thinking about how the fiendlight reflected in his eyes. We were partners, for better or for worse.

"I don't like prolonging the time we spend away from Yuna," he said, "But right now we are not ready to confront them."

It was only afterwards that I realized I didn't really know if he meant _them _Leviathan and Ashura, or _them _Tidus and Yunie and everyone else. Sometimes this world is a crazy place.

So it was up and down that hallway at the foot of those horrible stairs, our shadows long and flickering from the torchlight on the walls, pushing hard against our limits as we threshed through fiendkill after fiendkill, and I was knuckling my fingers under and dragging out spheres, every one I could lay hands on in that cold spaghetti flesh of theirs, each one of them the key to a locked treasure somewhere inside yourself. I guess I'd realized by this point that we'd need all those treasures and then some if we were going to be able to win against the house playing with loaded dice. It was different than the fiendkills we'd made coming down that spiral because then we'd just been trying to survive as long as possible. Now we were _hunting_. Sweat, and arrogance, and hurt. It's probably no wonder I loved that man.

It was dirty and sticky and filthy, and we lost track of time, counting it only in little marble-sized spheres that I was cramming into my pockets. And we didn't stop for lunch, and we didn't stop for dinner, and I was so hungry that my stomach had started to slowly digest itself, and I was bone weary and aching, damp hair plastered to my forehead, Deus Ex half gunked up with slowly oozing ichor so that I wouldn't have known which end of it was up if it hadn't still been strapped to the end of my arm. But still, even at the end of all of that, I never said _Auron, I'm tired. Let's stop,_ because as hard as it was, being out there with him was somehow right, like two strings plucked that resonate on the same chord, and then deep in the cold twist of my guts I already knew that this _time_, this summer place full of filth and grit and stink and tearing each other up just to put each other back together again couldn't last, would _never _last. _To all things must come a quiet night and sweet end._ I had already learned to be terrified of that quiet night and sweet end, and for us, the hand had already been called and laid. He was _already _dead. It was only a matter of time before somebody or some thing objected to that.

In the end, I decided that _guaranteed _we did not have time enough between the two of us for me to brood and sulk over it, because nobody ever does -- have the time, I mean. Life is meant to be lived, even if you don't get to live it for that long. Besides, he already did enough of the brooding and the sulking himself when I wasn't looking. He had dug his feet in a long time ago, but that didn't matter to me, because I was _dragging _him into happiness, whether he liked it or not. Maybe he still didn't think he deserved it, but I think that's Yevon talking there. Everyone _deserves _happiness. In my book, there's just no other way you can slice it.

My pockets were bulging and I was slumping under their weight when he finally shouldered his sword and said, "That's enough for now."

I did a sad and dumb looking little dance of sheer relief and then suddenly I was scooped up and thrown up on his shoulder like I was four years old, and I was laughing and kicking my feet, going, "So is this gonna to be a habit with you?"

"No," he said shortly, "Today you did good work, but I pushed you too hard and too long. I don't want to be responsible for you fainting and knocking your brains out on the way back to camp."

"Oh _whatever_, big man," I said, because I wasn't buying any of that, "Give it up. You just wanted to grope my fabulous thigh."

It had rumbled somewhere, deep in his chest, then he'd corrected me with the crinkle of a deed notarized by the Fayth of Indara, "_My _fabulous thigh."

And that made me laugh.

-

Back at El Casa du Leviathan, Ashura fed us plates and plates of roast beast until I couldn't manage any more and flopped over on my side on the cool mosaic stones. Even Big Red leaned back against the wall and looked two parts of content.

For me, there was really only one thing missing.

"It would be so totally beyond awesome to have a bath," I said wistfully, sort of wallowing in the grime I was depositing on their tiled temple floor. (Take that Yevon! I rebel at you even with my stink!) No worries, though. I was sure Leviathan would end up finding sweaty dirt at least half as fascinating as a puddle of barf.

"Granted," said the fish snake guado, idly waving me off from where he lay with his head in Ashura's radiantly pale moonglow lap.

I rolled over so I could look at him, "What do you mean, _'granted'_?" I was probably a little cross after a day of such hard work, and maybe you could hear it in my voice. I was tired and I didn't want to deal with Leviathan's idea of fun n' games.

"I mean 'Why don't you go look outside,'" he clarified, letting one negligent hand rise to point to the great double doors carved over with figures of the sea snake. Let me tell you, if there's one person I know who's totally humble and modest? It's Leviathan.

Except it's not. Maybe you figured that out already, since he decorates his house with huge stone images of _himself_. Talk about a _queen_.

Still, my heart fluttered at the sudden prospect of suds plus hot water, and I tripped over myself scrambling up and getting to those great carved doors. I was throwing my weight against them before I had really given myself time to think, hanging onto the handle and riding one of them full out onto the bridge so I could see the sea, and sure enough, although still tangerine dream orange, it was now filled with _soap bubbles_ as far as I could see. I called Leviathan a bunch of things which were pleasant for a change as opposed to obnoxious, and I think I promised to bear several of his fruity little lacy-finned children, and then I went whooping down the butterfly wing bridge like I was toddleriffic, flinging my clothes off this way and that, dancing to the squelching of leather and vinyl and rubber and the limp flutter of dingy ribbons -- and let me tell you they came off not just a little sticky-gummy owing to all the adventures (and lack of proper hygiene) I'd had since my last good wash. I _smelled_, and not like roses either. Fighting fiends for days at a time with no breaks will do that to even the best and most pleasant-smelling of us.

I guess I was so glad to get out of those nasty clothes that I really didn't care who saw my skinny little dirt-smudged butt, and I was singing at the top of my lungs about cleanliness and it being next to something good that wasn't Yevonliness. Maybe funliness. Funliness is a great word. It's totally opposed to _stinky grossoutliness_, anyway, which is the most important part. My song was completely and totally harmonizing with the Hymn of the Fayth too. Except it wasn't. I kept on singing anyway.

When I finally got down to the sand and the shore and the salt of black basalt, I marched fearlessly into that tangerine soup of suds and bubbles, and sure enough it was warm as tea, comfortable and nice like at the best hotel in Luca, and I almost started to wonder if Leviathan was going to provide fluffy, white oversized towels too. Maybe also a fresh terrycloth robe. Maybe a blue one. Blue is a nice color -- but then, I'm not all _that _particular.

Still wondering what kind of soft fuzzy robe king goldfish snake was going to provide, I stretched my arms up and lolled back in the water against a rock, for the moment perfectly content with the state of the world. It was then that I finally noticed that I had an audience. Hello voyeur, nice to meet you. My name is Rikku, and yes I remember that your name is _Auron_.

He was still standing on the fairy path a few feet up from where it buried itself in the beach, as if he was worried about sand getting into those great heavy boots of his. His arms were folded inside his gi, his sword propped against his thigh, and he was watching me like he expected me to somehow drown myself in three feet of water. Or, you know, two miles of bubbly water, since my bathtub was now roughly the size of the Kilika Gulf.

"Don't think I don't see you staring at my dainties, Legendary Guardian Pervert!" I yelled, because bathtime seems like a good time to yell things like that.

He raised his eyebrow, that look he gets when he's all_ oh really_, like he wasn't looking at _me_, even though he totally was, and then he snorted, like he had a particular opinion on just how _dainty _my dainties were, "I was staring at the fact that you had the aeon of the oceans turn the entire sea soapy and eighty-two degrees. That cannot be good for the native marine life."

That stopped me and I suddenly felt very guilty for slaughtering all the starfish and mollusks and whales and sharks and manta rays all so i could have a little beauty soak, even if I totally deserved it and it was about a million years overdue.

"Leviathan!" I hollered, flailing about in the water a bit as I debated how much more karma this would land me the next time I had to shoot a tonberry between the eyes. He was there suddenly, standing beside Big Red, looking very self-satisfied about the masterpiece of luxurious bathing that he'd wrought. I still wasn't feeling so great about it now that Professor One Eye had decided to rain on my parade.

"Fry," he answered tranquilly, kindly condescending like he always was, "I summoned the sea myself. When you asked for a bath I just summoned all the sea creatures to be compliant with the environmental changes, like high temperature water and a unique chemical balance of cleaning compounds." He smiled, thin-lipped, all teeth, "Don't worry. You haven't sent any sea cucumbers to their early deaths."

I relaxed and flopped back again, but then I started up, "You mean everything is still in here all sudsy and warm with me?"

"To the last fiddler crab, fry," he answered pleasantly.

"Then I'm taking a bath with an ocean full of giant squids and monster sharks?" I was feeling a little giddy, and I don't really think it was the temperature of the water.

"Don't worry about it," he said nonchalantly, moving to sit on the bridge, chin propped on one knee, easy as you please, like he was king of the world (which I guess, upon reflection, he was), "If anything dreadful starts to eat at you I'll give it a stern talking to."

"Well that's reassuring," I answered, rolling my eyes full circle before letting them fall on him again. Then I put my hands on my hips, "And what do you think you're doing, getting comfortable? This is not a free show!"

"My dear child," he said, faintly amused, "Don't you think in so many hundreds of years of extended life I would have seen a few naked ladies?"

"Well, maybe you'd think that, but you seemed pretty sold on a puddle of vomit up until very recently, and I wouldn't call that quality entertainment," I splashed at him ineffectually, like bath water was supposed to upset the Sea Fang, "Besides, I don't care how many naked ladies you've seen, you're not seeing this one, or at least not for free. If you wanna stay and watch me take a bath I'm totally going to assume that you forfeit your side of the match -- "

"He's gone," Auron interrupted.

"I can see that," I rolled my eyes again, a regular martyr on the hill or summoner in the Calm Lands. Then I stopped again and looked up, "I notice you're still here."

"I don't have a match to forfeit."

"You know, when we get back with everyone I'm totally going to tell all of Spira _all _your scandalous secrets," I warned, kicking my feet up so that my wriggling toes just broke the surface of the water, "Like that for a dead monk you've apparently got one scorcher of a libido."

"Nobody will believe you," he answered, relaxed, arms in his gi, and that just kicked some snow into my fire because I knew it was true. If I said _Auron's true dreams include chasing skirt and also little ruffly green shorts _(because that's the kind of distinct impression I was getting from his attention at the moment) then people would think I was certifiable, or at least that I'd inhaled the fumes of Ronso Dreamweed or something. Legendary Guardian Esq. comes off as Legendary Guardian Stonecold, most of the time.

"Besides," he objected tranquilly, "I'm just standing guard in case a shark takes interest in you while you're unarmed. You're one half of our current fighting capacity."

"_Unarmed_," I hooted, "Well, you be sure and tell that one to the judge, boss."

"If he asks, I will," he was totally assured and unworried. That was Auron, for you. "Then I'll show him the deed to a fifth of your person. I'm just protecting my investment."

"Your investment in my superkalifragalisticexpialo-_hotness_," I clarified, ducking under water so I could get started scrubbing my matty, icky hair.

"It's fortunate that you don't expect me to know what you're talking about half the time," he observed and I heard the rattle of buckles against leather as he settled against the hilt of his nihontou, "Because I don't."

"Good!" I thrashed and kicked until I managed to splash water up on the hem of his coat, "I don't bother _listening to you _half the time, so I guess we're even!"

I ducked under again so I didn't hear what he said after that, but I bet you can probably supply your own Auron dialogue here without my help!

-

So I had my bath and I even washed my clothes (which mainly entailed beating them against the rocks in the warm water until most of the ick came off). That's what comes of wearing leather and vinyl and rubber: easy cleanup. I felt much better for it, and when I finally shook the last of the water off of me like a shaggy dog, Ashura called me over to her and summoned herself an ivory backed brush and spent the next hour just gently detangling my hair with calm, even strokes. It needed it, being a rats' nest of too much adventuring and too little nourishing shampoo smelling of Bevelle gardens. I just sat good and still and thought about how nice it felt to have someone brushing out my hair while Auron sat on his stool and keened up the edge of the muramasa. I guess I can't ever remember anyone doing that for me. I don't remember mama at all, and whenever Lulu feels like playing beauty parlor dress-up it's Yunie's hair she fusses with. I guess I can't blame her. Yunie's hair is so pretty and soft and fine, the color of milk in coffee. She's _pretty and sweet and good_. I'm more, well, I'm more _me_, you see. Not the beauty who launched a thousand airships. More like the beauty who _sank _some airships. Although probably not a thousand. More like, I dunno, five.

"You remind me of my daughter," Ashura said softly, a break in her smooth, light humming, counter-harmony to the Hymn of the Fayth.

I started and turned around slightly so I could catch her with one of my eyes. There was a softness around the corners of her brilliant golden eyes that was hard to catch. I tried to smile at her.

"You have a daughter?" I asked, "I bet she's super immensely gorgeous if she's anything like you."

Ashura's smile viewed from over my shoulder was a flicker of warmth and kindness, "I had a daughter." She explained, "It was a long time ago and not here. It was in a different place underground, when Leviathan and I ruled over the lands below. It was my other self, you see. Not my self from Zanarkand, not the part that is of the Spiral, but the other part of me. The part of me that was bound here when I became the Fayth. The part of me from the outside."

"I'm not sure I understand," I said, scratching my fingers against my damp scalp. This seemed like pretty heavy stuff, and I've never been all that up on Yevon type teachings. I know you are shocked and astonished.

She caught the wisps of my hair between her fingers and piled it up on my head, messy and wonderful, and then she continued.

"It's a difficult thing to understand, yes. I didn't understand it myself when he and I decided to be bound as the Fayth," I turned to look at her and she was smiling sadly, like she'd remembered a hard memory. "That was really the only way we could be together, then." She paused and then let out a whispery sigh then turned her golden sun eyes on me again, "Summoners, callers, whatever you want to call them, well they've always been a part of the Spiral, a part of Spira. As have those from outside. The summoned."

"Aeons," I breathed and her smile quirked again.

"Something like that. Summoners have ever been a part of Spira. They are not a product of Yevon, simply something he caught up in his hands to use as he saw fit. The Fayth were his way of binding the summoned to his temples, so that he might build the idea of the Pilgrimage, of the penance, of the sacrifice. With no Fayth, you see," she murmured softly, "It is difficult to keep the faith_ful_."

"So you gave up your life?" I asked, leaning forward so that my pinned hair fell over my shoulders, "Your life with puppies and breakfast and traffic and your Guado civil lawyer boyfriend?" It was something I had a harder time wrapping my mind around than the idea that part of her was from beyond, that someone would give up all that for an eternity of being shackled in a temple.

I didn't have to ask her _why_. It was there in every word out of my mouth.

"It seemed like the best way at the time," she answered weakly, a slight shrug spilling down her shoulders like honey out of a comb, "Yevon's way did. And that way he and I could be together." Her eyes shifted up and over to Leviathan who had gone to sit by Auron to offer his indispensable advice on the care and maintenance of nihontou. King Goldfish Snake didn't look up, but from the curve of her mouth and the slope of her eyes I knew that he had to be the luckiest damn Goldfish Snake in the history of ever because she loved him _so completely _it was almost like she lost herself in doing it. She folded her hands in her lap as she looked back at me and knew that I _knew_. "And it wasn't so bad in the first years. But then the years swept on and fewer and fewer people came to us until finally none came at all, and the last priests went away or they died and we were left alone."

"It must have been hard," I said because I couldn't imagine it. All those years and them still _singing_ --

"We had each other," she said, "And we had our memories, both of our time before in Zanarkand and our otherselves of time outside." She cocked her head and all those tiny braids spilled over her shoulder, and I wanted to dig my fingers into them, or stroke them quietly, like petting a cat. I managed to keep my hands to myself. "And you must understand. The other part is me just as much as this part is me. We are two halves of the same thing, and the division is hazy at best. I am Ashura and the All Holy is Ashura. _We _are Ashura."

"Well," I said after a while of her threading pearls into my hair, "I like _you_. Ashura, All Holy, or whatever. I bet you were the greatest mom _ever_."

As she swept her hand across my eyes I got the briefest touch of a girl all in green, grass bright hair a flurry around her face, pearls over her ear and her face lit with fire and light.

Ashura smiled again, gently, wistfully. "I loved her."

I squeezed her hand.

"That's all it takes."

-

This one's for you, kid. Happy eight years.

Heart,

Gabi


	9. Chapter Eight: The Chernobyl Cowboy

Maybe it was the next day and maybe it was a thousand years later -- it was hard to keep track of time down in the hole like that. We didn't have a sunrise and we didn't have a sunset, just that endless tangerine glow all the time from the fungus under the sea and under the sky. I had learned that rhyme as a kid -- any kid who grows up knowing starboard and 'larboard and all that stuff can stand on their head and do a jig while singing _red sky at morning_, but there wasn't any morning and there wasn't any night, so I was pretty much stuck over whether to take warning or have a delight. There was something else though, besides the fact that we couldn't see the sun circling us, or feel ourselves circling the sun. My heartbeat was the hymn and his heartbeat was the water on the rocks, or maybe it was the other way around -- it was uncountable time, being there, being with him, in love with a dead man and eating pancakes made by a mother fayth and falling back into the ocean bathtub of a guado lawyer. It wasn't real and at the same time it was more real than anything that's ever happened now or since.

I read a book when I was a kid -- hey, don't take that tone with me. _Of course I can read_, and not just in Al Bhed either. Anyway, I read this book about a girl who gives her guardian the slip and follows this white auroch into a hole in a mountain side. She falls down this hole, right? And she finds all this bogus strange weird stuff and get this, when she finally goes home -- well it doesn't say this, but this is what I _knew _after I read it. After spending all that time trying to get out of that weird upside down place underground and go back home, all she ever wanted to do was _go back_.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I wasn't really thinking about all this _now_, or maybe I was a little, even then. What I was thinking about was that great big pile of fish coils and lacy spines and fins that was Leviathan, but I wasn't exactly preparing to ask him if I could be president of his fan club.

Red and I were sitting on a big flat rock on the black basalt beach. We had unpacked all the spheres we had on us, and sat sorting them like they were piles of captured pyreflies -- blue, yellow, green, pink. This one would build your muscles. That one would fire your brain. This one was the key to something that you _knew_, but just couldn't remember.

I don't know how much you know about spheres, but there are all kinds, more than I really want to bother to count. They use some kinds to fill that huge blitzball sphere in Luca because it does a lot of things that water just _can't _do, like hold it's shape like that, for one thing. Other spheres, well, they were fit inside spherecorders and messages were printed on them. When you hold the sphere just right, you can see the messages played back. You can see messages from people who've been dead maybe a really long time recorded on spheres. Well, maybe that's not so impressive these days. Sometimes I think I know more dead people than live ones.

There are other kinds of spheres, though. The spheres that you find after fiends spin off into pyreflies, those never have any secret messages from royal dead guys. They're blank, but I guess they aren't _really _blank. They're more than blank. They're _potential_. You can pick one up and hold it close to your chest like it's a little baby animal, and you can feel its heartbeat because its heartbeat is your heartbeat, and it's become _you_. After you take in a sphere, you're more _you _than you were before. It doesn't matter what kind of sphere or when or where or how, and it's not really something I'm good at explaining. It's just something you _know_. You get smarter or you get faster or your get stronger or you understand something that you didn't before, but it's more than that. It's _you_ness. It's _me_ness. When I eat a sphere, I increase my Rikku Quotient. I am more Rikku than I was before, which is pretty much a paradox, because the state of something's Rikkuness is defined by Rikku right? I told you it doesn't really make sense. I don't think it's supposed to.

We had done our hunting and gathered up all those spheres because if we were going to defeat princess fairyfins snake then we were going to have to be _more _than we were when we started, not just stronger or faster. _Better_.

So I ate my spheres or I hugged them to my chest, filling out the spaces inside me where I didn't even know there were gaps. Auron did the same thing, slowly. Maybe it's harder for him, filling in the pieces now that he's dead. Maybe it makes him understand more about himself and maybe he doesn't always like it. I think he's stupid because I like him fine: arrogance, brush-offs, and pudding-feedings aside, but maybe this is because Brother dropped me on my head too many times as a baby. What can I say? You should not leave a kid prone to full body flailing in charge of a baby or that baby will grow up to lust after dead men.

At last he undid the strap that kept that nog jug riding over his hip and sat it between us. I thought maybe he was going to offer me a little more courage in the shot but what he really did was undo a tight little knotted string that hung off the jug and let the beads on the string carefully spill off in front of me. The last of the beads was purple and faintly luminous and I realized that it wasn't really a bead at all, but some kind of sphere that I'd never seen before. He held it up in front of me, thumb and forefinger, and it shimmered in the orange light.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

I took a deep breath and squinched all the muscles I could manage up into tight little bunches, then I forced myself to relax. I nodded.

"Open your mouth."

I did, and although I wasn't asked I also closed my eyes because if this was going to be anything like the _last _thing he fed me, I didn't want to see it going down _or _coming up.

He put it on my tongue and it rolled there, dissolving slowly like a a ball of honey -- a trickquid, because it wasn't really wet, just loose and losing shape. I closed my mouth and it was warm, draining faintly away into some deeper part of me, slipping off down my throat, into my head, into my _self_.

And then there it was, all at once, like a bullet to the brain. It hit me so hard that I reeled backward and maybe my brains would have come slopping out when my skull split from hitting the rock behind me, but he launched himself forward, as if he'd been crouched for it, his bare hand a cap over the back of my wobbly blond head. We ended up in a tangle of red velvet and arms and legs, and when I came back to myself I was panting, eyes dilated, and the world was still spinning all around the glare that I caught off the rim of his glasses.

He sat back and I tried to sit up feebly, but fell limply backward again.

"Not yet. It's too much for you yet." He said.

"All right, boss." Is what I managed, because I wasn't in any kind of mood to argue with the doctor.

I laid there for a long time, my head turned so I could look out at the sea and at that crystal tower that presided over it.

At last he asked, "Are you afraid?"

I thought about it.

"No. Not any more."

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )**

**Chapter Eight: Killing the Chernobyl Cowboy**

We were _almost _ready. I say almost because there was one more thing that _I_ could do to make us more ready. Maybe I'll never be as tall and brooding and statuesque as Lulu, or as shining bright and hope-beaming as Yuna, but Spira has only got one Princess Aurora of the Al Bhed, and if you are slow on the uptake (like Brother), that Princess of the Al Bhed is me. I can't summon and I'm no healer and I'm really no kinds of mage. I'm fast, sure, but I still pretty much hit like a girl (don't get me wrong, I am still surefire convinced I could take down Uncle Braska in a fistfight), and maybe that makes me the girl that they let into the party only cause she won't go away -- or because she is so radiantly beautiful, one or the other.

Nope, I can't summon. I can't rain down flares or curagas or anything.

But I can do something better than all of that.

I can _synth_.

Now I know you're thinking to yourself, _great Rikku, I agree that you are awesome, but is this really the time to be throwing a big hip-hip-hooray party for yourself? Maybe this is not the best time for your amazing synthing prowess._

**Wrong**. Now? Is the _best time there has ever been _for my amazing synthing prowess. Do you know why? It is because I spent the whole morning after my transcendental awakening skin diving into the tangerine sea. I had a net full of weeds and skins and scales and stones that I had dragged out of the silky, spilling insides of some pretty nasty fiends. I dunno if Auron really knew what I was up to or not. He sure didn't _say _anything about it, just sat on the beach with his eyes closed meditating or something. I say _or something _because I am _convinced _he was staring right at my delicate secrets every time I was out of the surf to pile up my treasures and my back was turned. Trust me. A girl knows when someone is staring at her delicate secrets.

Anyway, he didn't say anything but that could've been because I was already doing something he expected me to do. He's not the kind of guy who gives praise out when he sees you doing something that he has already thought of. He's the kind that gives you a talking to when you _aren't _doing these magical things he's already thought of. Yeah, as you might've already guessed, he is the kind of guy who sometimes needs a punch in the face really, really badly.

Fortunately, I am a totally forgiving soul.

Still, I did not harbor any hopes at all that he was ready to let me start fondling his nihontou, no matter what my excellent intentions were. It's probably all for the best anyway, since I'm pretty sure I already synthed that thing to its limit one night while he was asleep or something. Hey, I never like to leave all that sexy potential just lying there wasted when it could be put to awesome use.

So, since I am not usually in the habit of carrying a bunch of extra swords strapped to my lovely and petite little back, I invited myself back into the temple of Indara and to see Leviathan.

He was lying with his eyes closed in this hammock, square in the middle of the patch of tangerine light that came down through the big rose window. I kid you not. Wearing sunglasses and fanning himself with a little fan of gull feathers or something. Ashura was settled on her knees nearby reading him poetry. _I told you he had it good._

When I came sauntering up he pushed his sunglasses down his nose so he could take stock of me idly over them. He waved languidly at Ashura and she thoughtfully paused in her reading.

"So, have you come to honor our agreement, fry?"

I rolled my eyes, "Do I look like I have? Do you see Tall, Dark, and Sinister anywhere? No, I didn't think so." I blew the hair up out of my eyes and artfully changed the subject, because I am smooth like that. "Say Levi, you have an armory somewhere in this temple, right? You used to have priests and guards and stuff, before, you know, _everything_."

He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose and fell bonelessly back into his hammock like I'd just spoiled his fun for the whole day.

"There's a staircase in the east chancel. There ought to be something left in the armory down there. If you find anything you like, go ahead and take it."

"Well, I was gonna anyway," I answered sassily, my hands on my hips. Ashura laughed musically into the back of her hand.

"I know," he answered laconically and then he waved Ashura to begin reading her poetry again, and with that I was dismissed.

I am going to assume that you have never been down into a centuries old armory in a temple that has been abandoned by everything living -- even the bite bugs -- for about a jillion years. Forgive me if I am jumping to conclusions and you do this every week or something.

It was one of those things that made me glad of all the Kilika Jones stuff my dad has been dragging me into since the time I learned how to drool (and who to drool on). For one thing, I am not unfamiliar with ruins, even ruins under the ocean, which this one fortunately was not. Leviathan had not conveniently forgotten to mention that the back stairs were flooded or something, or that the whole room was protected by robot guard alligators. If there's one thing I hate, it's a robot guard alligator.

The room I found was pretty dusty and it was really cluttered, like for years whenever anybody had found something that they didn't want crowding up the temple upstairs they had just dumped it down the stairs and hoped it rolled into the armory. It wasn't just weapons or shields and things, a lot of it was just junk. All kinds of completely random stuff left by people on pilgrimages before the temple had become lost, and then maybe some stuff that had been left _since _the temple had become lost. The weird thing about it was that it wasn't just all piled up helter-skelter, like you'd expect in a room of stuff that had been left behind by people that had been dead forever. It was all carefully ordered, and, if a little dusty, it almost had the look of of a museum -- of somebody's private collection. Like some razor boned guado attorney still liked to go down those back stairs and look at the things that been left behind, to hold them and think about them, about the people he'd known who were all dead, except for Ashura. About the world above that had forgotten them even after their sacrifice.

And still, _he kept singing._

Maybe I didn't want to punch _him _in the face so much right then either.

So I cleared myself a little space in that dead-end museum and set up my own little synth shop with my pack of junk from all over Spira and my net of stuff recovered from a tangerine sea. I found a sword that would do for old Captain Blood and I found enough stuff to build myself a new targe. I had my own beloved Deus Ex back by this point, as you might remember, as well as my revolver, so I was pretty much set other than the targe. The bracer I couldn't do much about. It was a good bracer, and as I related earlier, I'm the one who made it as good as it is. Sadly, being _awesome _means you are also maxed, which means you lack flexibility and while I could screw a piece of metal into a ring and bend that to fit onto one of my gloves and make myself a dandy targe, I didn't have the more specialized tools and materials I'd need to make a new bracer out of basically nothing.

My pops always tells me _Rikku, pa bnybynat_. He claims it is ancient advice from a worthy source, but I bet he's just repeating something he heard some little kids saying. Besides, I don't have room in my pack to carry parts for fifty shields or rings and armguards when you can buy that stuff at any respectable travel agency. _That _space is reserved for all the weird crap I dig out of fiends. My pack is always jingling and tinkling and fluttering with the weight of chocobo feathers and little vials of sand and holy bells and old scribbled notes and counterweights for pendulums and the gil that used to be in _your _pockets.

Handicaps aside, _I am Rikku J. Cidolphus._ I could get us ready in a hurricane even if I had _no arms_.

And I hammered and cut and sanded and blasted and screwed things together in ways they had never before been screwed. Ashura brought me some lunch and watched me work for a while, all sweaty with the hair stuck to my face.

"He wants you to win." She said at last and really pretty much out of the blue. I would've forgotten she was there maybe if not for the constant wash of love that came over me whenever she was close.

"Huh?" Was all I said, because I am not like Auron and full of limited, grave, monumental sayings that everyone likes to quote. I am mostly full of stuff like "Huh?" "No way!" and "Yikes!"

"He wants you to win," she repeated and then tilted her head, "I want you to win as well. But mark, Daughter of Cidolphus, this will not make your battle easier. As the fayth, we have a great deal of pride, but as our otherselves? _You cannot imagine_, Rikku of Cidolphus."

As she spoke, I could hear the hymn echoing around me and deep inside my bones and guts and blood, like it would almost shake me apart. That old historian guy had told me once that the hymn was a song from another world. _I can believe that_.

"We're going to win _because we have to_," I answered fiercely, because I could feel that too, with all the guts and blood and bone in my body. There was no other way _and we would do it_, and this I believed with all parts and pieces that were me. I was small and spindly and dry as the sand in Sanubia, _but I believed it._

"In Zanarkand," she said appreciatively, "You would have made a strong summoner."

And I didn't have much to say to that.

Maybe it was the next day and maybe it was a thousand years later. I pulled on my gloves and I fitted my new targe and I strapped Deus ex Machina around my fist, and then Auron shouldered his nihontou, the electricity crackling along the blade so it made our loose hair tremble and dance. And he went first and I went after, and we crossed the gossamer bridge of light and butterfly wings and song.

In the middle of the tiled floor of Indara, standing in the center of the light spilled from the great rose window and on his carpet figured over with all those strange creatures of the sea, Leviathan stood with his long arms folded behind his back, and Ashura stood behind him, the queen sentinel, as beautiful as a golden pearl.

"We have come, Fayth of Indara," Auron's voice boomed in the acoustic space, level and sure, "To honor the terms of our bargain."

"Rikku of Cidolphus is in agreement?" asked Ashura, her moon golden eyes on me.

"She is," answered Leviathan nonchalantly, waving her off.

"_Hey_," I shouted, leaning forward and balling my fists.

Leviathan raised an eyebrow, "You are, are you not, fry?"

I crossed my arms and couldn't help but look sullen. I was _feeling _sullen. I wanted to kick sand into his elegantly angled face.

"I am," I admitted, although I didn't want to, "But I wanted to say so _myself_."

He shrugged and passed an amused look to Auron which I'm sure he thought said _oh, what will they think of next _and said only, "Forgive me." It didn't sound so much like an apology as it did a royal command. He continued. "Then you do me honor. I will meet your challenge. Ashura!"

I could hear the golden queen singing softly to us, and I didn't know if the fight had already started or it was over and we were dead just like that, but if we were, then death was _nice_. I was suddenly all over gentle warm, safe, carried along by the sound of her music. It was like being _inside _of white magic, shimmer and light and warmth and the passing flash of grace, and I tilted my head back and felt myself slowly touch back to the earth. I felt more alive than sunshine and waterfalls and skiprope and dancing -- more alive than _anything_ -- and then it slowly drifted out of me, like heat out of a cooling engine, and I began to feel like myself again.

"She has healed you so that our fight will be fair," said the king of the oceans, "Now, _come_."

I didn't think much in those first few seconds. I knew I couldn't. I knew I didn't have time. I had come with yellow feathers between my fingers -- a parting gift from Frances -- and before anyone had moved, I had rained haste down on both of us.

But Leviathan had _already _moved, a great pulse upward so that he was no longer a blade thin guado lawyer, but now that terrible thing that I had seen drawn so many times, painted on everything, everywhere, but had never _understood _until now. He was a mountain, piles and piles of coils all heaped together and uncoiling into this impossible length of aquamarine scales that cast rainbows when the light glinted off of them. He was fins and spikes and spines and whiskers and _the eyes of a god _and suddenly I was ankle deep in water and it was pouring in _everywhere_, from every crevice and window, from the mouth of every statue, from the sky as rain even though we were indoors, and through the wide open double doors behind us. He reared his head, like a great snake about to strike, his fin wings flared and his whole body undulating as if he were riding a current. And he did _nothing_, but I could see it gathering behind him, sucked toward him, around our ankles, building, a high, terrible wave.

_He'll drown us_, is what I wanted to shout, but there was no time, and Auron had already run forward, head down, shoulder behind that blade that sang with electricity, his dark hair flying out behind him in a whipping snake's tail. I put down my own head and dug my fingers around one of the curved blades of Deus ex Machina and I let the lighting ripple off of me, teeth gritted, feeling the heaven shock punishment of thundaga raining down on the sea serpent once, and then twice -- a trick Auron had helped me steal from Lulu and make into Rikku.

I could hear Leviathan scream and toss in rage, and I could see Auron circling his tail, jumping up when it was low and catching it like a swing, climbing the writhing mountain of Leviathan so that his strikes counted before Leviathan screamed and bucked him off again. I had already drawn my gun, and this time when I called the lightning down on him I aimed at his pitching head and I shot at his great god eyes.

It was lighitngthunderelectricity again and again, as fast as I could call it down, shooting when I could, popping tablets as the magic drained out of me, through me like I was a sieve, and I couldn't even see Auron any more, and then, and then and then --

And then it was over us, it was on us, it was through us, the tsunami of the sea fang, that impossible wall of water that broke all my bones and shattered my teeth and slammed me into the floor, spent and limp and trembling. But then I was up, swimming like mad through the cathedral filled to the high arched ceilings with a million tons of water because I was Rikku J. Cidolphus, synth genius, and I had _eaten that wave. _I called thundaga _and I called thundaga and I called thundaga and I looked for Auron, I looked for Auron, I looked for Auron and I couldn't find him, too much water everywhere -- and then I found him, limp, weak and still as a stone, still as a stone._

_Auron can't swim, _I screamed to myself.

_He's already dead_, I screamed back.

Leviathan threw me against one of the great pillars by flashing his tail through the water like a whip and I saw stars and I suddenly had a moment vision of Jecht fighting Leviathan alone, _because neither Braska nor Auron could swim._

I called thundaga and I called thundaga and_I called thundaga_, but it wasn't enough, not me alone, and I could feel my bones breaking when Leviathan threw me against the wall, and I couldn't slug the potion fast enough to knit them back together again before I was thrown into something else.

I needed something. I needed _something_. I had to do something or we were going to lose, Leviathan would pulp me against the wall until I couldn't twitch any more and then all of it would be gone, my auroch hole -- there and back again, and what Rikku found there -- Auron. Everything. _Everything_. I bet it all on the chump's odds that I would win. _I would win._

I called the lightning and he slung me hard against the wall, and I could feel the water rushing back past us, gathering behind him in another great tidal wave.

Strength. Faith. Hope. Love. Determination. What was it that changed the world? It wasn't death. It wasn't losing. It wasn't giving up.

My ear left a pink trail when I turned, blood from my head. There was water on my brain and I wouldn't be able to think much longer. I could still see Auron down there, a dark red stone, his coat whipping fast in the riptide as Leviathan drew the water back to himself. I turned my head and shoved the half empty potion bottle into my ear, hoping that it would clot the blood enough so I could sling down a few more spells. I called the lightning, and I wrenched down deep, as far as I could go, feeling back, feeling back for what it was that I needed, that I _knew_, and _I found it_, I found it finally in the dark and the mess of my guts, and I grabbed hard at it, as hard as I could hold, my nails digging into it and shattering, so that they bled, jagged, and I yanked it out, I yanked it out of the dark lost place where it had been, and I threw it up for the world to see, and it rained down on both of us.

_Float._

And we were on the water, we were on the water, our feet making gentle dimples like we were messiahs or saints, and I called the lightning and I fell onto my knees, into the sea, but I stayed on top of that great mass of water. Something inside me was leaking, dripping out where I'd wrenched the lost thing free, and I couldn't stand. I doubled over like a fetus, the blood from my ear in my eyes, gluing one of them shut. I panted and I bled, inside and out, and I watched Auron run along the wave crests like they were a whispering sea of grass and I saw him call the twister, his feet one after another in that last, final spiral of his blade and of the ki wind that would end this, end us, end everything, and I heard Leviathan trumpet, and I shivered.

Then everything was gone, the water all at once, and the mass of dark serpent coils. There was just the floor of the temple, the great tapestry rug, and water dripping slowly down from the ceiling. I could only see Auron's feet, because he was standing. I laughed and it was thready and weak and I couldn't move my head to look up at him, to look around for Leviathan. I could feel it pooling out of me, everywhere, all of me out onto the floor where water still stood half an inch deep. I heard Auron uncork a bottle and I smelled the faint cinnamon spice of Elixir, but then there was a gentle voice.

"No. It's too late." That was Ashura.

"Damnit, It _can't _be too late. Not _this_. Not _again_."

I saw Auron's knee very close to my face and then I felt someone pick up my head, but I couldn't understand who it was.

"It is beyond you to heal her, Auron of Faris. She has split open her insides, casting that spell. That was impressive magic. It is not of this plane."

I could hear him swearing again, and I felt like I should say something about it, but I couldn't think of anything, I couldn't think of how to _say_.

"She is brave and resourceful," that was Leviathan. "And it may please you to know that she does love you. She is worthy to have been born under my star." He sounded desperately pleased with himself. I wanted to laugh again, but I didn't have that left any more.

"_And now she will die."_

"Peace, Auron of Faris. I said that it was beyond _you _to heal her. It is not beyond _me_."

I felt like I was lifted up again, but this time it was warm and filling, and I could feel whatever was leaking out of me still, and then stop. I could feel it all being knit together again, warm and fine and sure. I could feel all of _me _being knit together again, like I was a scarf that had been pulled apart and then somehow woven back together again, all of the same yarn, all of the same weave, all of the same Rikku.

I felt the ground again under my feet and I staggered, but then I was against an iron shoulder, a gloved hand on my own bare shoulder, and I hiccuped and I panted, and then I finally opened my eyes.

"Congratulations, Auron Faris and Rikku Cidolphus," said Leviathan, and at first I only saw his knees, but gradually the rest of him came into focus as I learned how to hold my head again. His arms were crossed over his bare chest and he did look _extraordinarily pleased with himself_. "You have bested me in fair and open combat, something no other mortals of this plane may claim."

I let out the biggest, lamest, goofiest puppy sigh, and then I really did go limp. I heard Auron swear again as he jumped to catch me before I said how-do-you-do-good-morning with the floor again. He picked me up and held me because he probably didn't know what else to do with me. He couldn't just put me down on the floor, which still had standing water in it enough to see tide pool life ekeing around his boots.

"She is still weak," noted Leviathan, executively. "You will have a day of rest."

A day of rest. I wasn't sure when the last time I'd had one of those was. Maybe before I could walk.

"You will have a day of rest," he repeated and then he bowed respectfully to the graceful woman at his side. "Then you will fight the All Holy. Then you must fight Ashura."

_Ashura._


	10. Chapter Nine: Two of a Kind and Working

When I woke up I felt kind of like a pudding -- all tepid warm, like all the joints of my body had dissolved into jelly and if I really wanted to make the effort to actually go somewhere I was going to have to _ooze _there. This may not be an entirely accurate analogy, being as I have never actually been a pudding, only been forced to swallow one basically whole, but I think you get the general idea. I've felt that way before -- usually when I've had some kind of mysterious plague flu. I had those all the time as a kid, courtesy of my retarded brother who was some kind of malignant germ magnet when I was not yet tall enough to ride this ride. He was always giving me something that I didn't want, and I'm not talking about lousy birthday presents here. Nothing says_ I care _more than giving your one and only sister the Chocobo Pox. Repeatedly.

But this really wasn't like that, since I wasn't feverish hot. Under the blanket I was a nice kind of warm, like bathwater warm, and there was a really fabulous breeze coming through the open window. I was lying on my belly, the way I usually sleep, face half buried in a fat pillow and staring at a carved headboard that looked kind of strangely familiar. It was really nice artisan work, maybe Ronso carved, and I knew, I just _knew _that I knew where it was from, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. This is probably mostly because I was still maybe nine and three quarters asleep.

The design itself was an interworked promise ring design, knots and rings intertwined in one impossible thread that went from one side to the other, unbroken. I remember I used to tell Gippal that the Ronso carved it that way as a map showing the location of a fabulous secret treasure buried on Gagazet. He used to tell me that if that were the case then the Ronso really suck at map-making. Some people just lack _creative vision_.

Wait. _Wait_. _**Wait wait wait**_.

If that was the map bed then this was --

"_Rin's Calm Lands!" _I blurted into the pillow, and struggled to prop myself up on my pudding arms to look around the room. I dunno what I expected to see, but whatever it was, it wasn't what I _did _see.

Because the room was sunshine warm, all pale golden wood, a cheery quilted spread and an open window looking out on the endless open space of the Calm Lands and the slowly nodding grasses. This was the master suite of Rin's Calm Lands. It was, could be no other, and Maester Mika on a tricycle if I shouldn't know. Sometimes I think I spent at least fifteen percent of my life dusting crap in this room.

_Cbudmacc, Rikku. Fa sicd taveha aqlammahla ev fa yna kuehk du lrynka vun ed._ Yes, Rin-pucc. Although now that I think about it it wasn't exactly like there was some kind of other Pan-Spiran hotel chain we were competing with. It was pretty much Rin's or sleep outside in the rain. In that way I guess we were pretty much the best game in town.

"It looks that way."

I turned my head toward the sound of his voice but all this abrupt movement was too much for my jelly-joints and I fell back against the pillow. I could see him though, so I guess I accomplished what I had set out to accomplish. It was at this point that I realized some other things about my situation that were at least half as unexpected as waking up in the master suite at Rin's Calm Lands.

They were, in order of importance:

Exhibit A: I was not wearing anything but my shorts and skivvies, and let me be frank with you here and share one of my most secret of Rikku secrets. My skivves are only say about 50 as indecent-exposure-averting as say, Yunie's are. Look, I wear a heavy-duty molded rubber top and it's not like I've been gargantuanly blessed by the breast fairy like someone else I know has (I think I have mentioned her chest-mounted mind control beams before). I don't strictly speaking really _need _to wear the other half of the combo, considering my ensemble of choice has built in support. So let me spell it out for you if you're having trouble following along with me in your book. I was wearing underpants and those ruffly green shorts I have already told you I know he digs, and that's pretty much it. I know you're taking careful notes at this point. _I was_. But wait for it. It gets better.

Exhibit 2: Auron was not standing against the wall with his arms crossed and looking at me with his one eye. He was not sitting in the chair by the bed, anxiously holding my hand in hopes I would recover from scarlet fever. He was in the bed with me, blankets down to his waist because he was too hot for the Calm Lands or maybe just because he was waiting for me to wake up and stare at his chest like a muscle eating zombie or something: I am voting number two here because in my experience that is really how he operates, no matter what everyone else thinks. Also, we were the shirtless twins and by straining I could see the rest of his things and my things thrown over the bedside chair, but organized, you know, carefully, his boots lined up with my shoes, my shirt folded, my _socks _folded. _Ev ed'c fundr tueh', ed'c cyjuneh'._ Sometimes I really think he must be from a lost Al Bhed tribe. He really thinks like an Al Bhed sometimes. A lot of the time, being an Al Bhed means doing what you think is best, what you think is _needed_, and not giving a flying iron giant what anybody else thinks about it. This was an Al Bhed moment.

Exhibit C: His hand was on my butt. That's pretty much all there is to that one, and no matter what he might say about "making sure I was comfortable" by methodically rendering me topless while limpid, I wasn't about to believe his hand was on my fanny to keep abreast of my vitals, especially since since this was, at the moment, one of the few areas actually covered by my clothing. His hand was on my butt. For everyone who has been waiting since they were born for me to say "Then I realized Auron's hand was on my butt," (like me) here it is for you again, so you can keep it for posterity: _**Auron's hand was on my butt.**_ There. Do you think I should underline it a few more times for emphasis? This was an underlining moment.

If I could've taken a picture of this moment and sent it to everyone who had ever existed anywhere I would've right then, just to prove all of what I've been saying all this time is like, a hundred and fifty percent true. Even if I had I known that everyone ever would have just congratulated me on such a great hoax, except for one important element: it was just too totally ridiculous to ever believe. It's all right. I can wait until I have fifty kids with dark hair, brown eyes, and horrifically tense demeanors, scarring each other up when they're toddlers. Nobody's gonna be able to say to me then _wow those are some good made up kids, Rikku._

I bet he really couldn't have predicted that that was what I was thinking about at that particular moment, but then maybe he could've. Sometimes I suspect he reads me better than I think he reads me. _I gotta feeling._

But yeah, so this is me, Rikku J. Cidolphus. When I wake up in a bed with a man I've been waiting maybe forever to wake up in a bed with, I'm more stuck on the _in a bed _part than the man part. I'm going to have to name at least three of my fifty kids Junque just as punishment for my deep and perverse (probably parentally inflicted) brain damage. Yes, that's what the J stands for, hardy-harr. I bet you can't guess which of my parents came up with that one. (A hint, his name begins with C and ends with D and I am in the middle).

"I am way half naked," I said finally, not so much an accusation, but more conversationally. _ Hey, did you notice? I am totally half naked. Did you have anything to do with that? Maybe? Maybe? Huh? Huh?_

"That's one way of looking at it," he answered, equally conversationally. Well, as conversationally as he gets, which seems really to be more and more around me, not that I'd say he's chatty, really, more you know that he's willing to make words specifically addressed at me period, words that aren't just _duck _and _get down _and_ don't touch that_. He's so romantic. It is probably really sad that I think this is actually true. At this point I think he's really lucky that the beautiful and fantastic girl he ended up falling desperately and sickly in love with fell on her head so many times when she was a kid that she thinks every stupid or potentially socially invasive thing he does is nine kinds of wonderful.

Right now I felt it was necessary to inform him of such, so I did.

"I'm starting to think," he said, after I had made my declaration of many true facts, "That that part just takes care of itself."

**The Shape of His Heart**

**By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )**

**Chapter Nine: Two of a Kind and Working **

"So when did we get to the Calm Lands?" was what I asked next, or really first since the last time I checked _I am half naked _is not phrased in the form of a question.

"We didn't." He said, and at that I was sorely perplexed because if this wasn't Rin's Calm Lands then it was a really convincing facsimile. I mean, even the print on the curtains was right -- little yellow chocobos and small diamonds like stars. I loved those curtains. I wish I could say that Rin let me decorate this room when I was five and already unmatched at interior design, but he really didn't. He used to tell me though that my mama had given him the chocobo curtains a long time ago. So the room was really _just _how I remembered it when I was going to work for Rin the first time more than ten years ago.

And that was maybe it. It didn't look like Rin's Calm Lands does today, it couldn't because Rin gave me those curtains for my own room the last summer I worked for him. I didn't have any windows back at home so I painted myself my own view -- whatever it was I wanted to see all crammed into one frame, and then I hung the curtains around that. That's all gone now, burnt to cinders and lost in the sand when we blew Home. Maybe I'll paint another view some day, and find some more Chocobo print curtains to hang around it when I make myself another Home.

I don't even think Rin's Calm Lands still has the map bed. I can't remember it being there last time we went. Maybe he moved it to Bevelle or something. It always was the best bed.

"Where are we?" I asked, although I was already beginning to know the answer to that.

"Indara," he said. "You needed a place to rest, so I made a request of Ashura. She sent me to this room. When I brought you here, this was how it looked."

"She summoned it." I surmised, letting my head loll to the side. "I always loved this room."

"This place," he sat up, and then turned deliberately away, "Not this room, but this place in general, is the last place I can remember feeling alive."

"Until now," I said, and I meant it, even if he wasn't willing to, but then he turned back to look at me for a moment, a second like a hot knife down my back, and he said,

"Until now."

-

Maybe you're waiting to figure out the gimmick I've got going. I mean, I've been telling this story after the fact from the beginning (which is really the only way to tell any kind of story unless you got a crystal ball or are just really good at making stuff up) and every once in a while I do say crap like "little did we know then that we would never see young Wakka alive again" but I try not to, because that doesn't really make any sense anyway. I don't gotta wonder what's going to happen here, since I already lived through it, but in case you're sitting on pins and needles trying to figure out just what the terrible truth really is, let me set some things straight for you.

I am not going to die tragically (again). I am not going to live through this and forget all of Auron's dark secrets and then die tragically later (not even eventually. As of this moment I am not yet dead and I do not plan to become so ever in the foreseeable future). Auron is not going to die tragically (he already did). Leviathan is not going to open up a we-fix-it garage in Luca. I only get naked four more times in this story. I probably could've gotten naked more and I don't think anyone would have really objected, but I didn't want Leviathan staring at my good stuff without even a match to throw on account of it. Now that I think about it I probably should have gotten naked more. It's not like I get a lot of opportunities for it above ground. Wakka would take two poops, turn purple, and then die, I know it. Yevonites are usually pretty scared of the lovely and unmarked body of a radiant and nubile girl, although I bet I wouldn't hear him complaining much if Lulu decided her skirt made of belts was as uncomfortable as it looks and threw it in a fire.

Just so you know? I don't have a gimmick, just a story, our story, what there's left of it to tell.

This is our story.

-

I'm not going to try and pretend that I didn't stay in the map bed in Rin's Calm Lands for a good long time. It was comfortable and Auron was comfortable and I was still so tired, even after that holy cure from Ashura. I felt a little like Brother had beaten me black and blue with a crowbar for telling Yunie about his secret retarded crush, not that I have ever done this and this has ever happened to me as a consequence. I am just using my _imagination_.

It was nice just to be still next to him, still in a comfortable bed, listening to him breathing. I couldn't count for sure when I'd get the chance to do this again, except maybe I'd get to that night, since I figured our day of rest was a whole twenty four hours and not some literal interpretation garbage and we were expected to burn the midnight oil fighting the All Holy. Levi might be a lawyer and he might also sometimes be a jackass, but fortunately I don't think he's ever both at the same time. If he was, I don't think even Ashura could love him.

But eventually I knew I had to get out of bed, not because I was tired of it or anything, or because I felt one thousand percent better (although I did feel one thousand percent better than when I had been bleeding all my everything out onto the floor). I got out of bed because there are a million more things to do in the world other than the ones you can only do in bed. Also I have heard that you do not, strictly speaking, even have to be in bed anyway. Of course this might just be a malicious rumor started by anti-bedites. I am talking about sleeping. What did you think I was talking about? _I bet I can guess._

Really though it hadn't progressed more than his hand on my butt and me snuggling against him, which was pretty much great by itself. We were both a little awkward and for all his clear intention we were both a little shy. So we fumbled around a little, slow and comfortable, just learning the shape of one another. I guess I never really thought about it before but he was a monk forever, and then he was a dead monk. I know there was that business with the Maester's daughter -- I mean, everybody knows that, but I don't think he's ever really been physically close with a lady before. I mean, maybe I'm just fooling myself, but it pretty much seems like his M.O.: being lusty and then exhibiting inhuman and righteous self-denial. Maybe in the beginning it was righteous, I mean he had such a stick up his butt when he was younger. It's so obvious. And then maybe after Braska and Sin it turned into being punishment, and by that point he couldn't even imagine it ever being anything different.

So he became vaguely reassured that I was girl-shaped, but I wasn't brave enough yet to verify that he was boy-shaped -- but still that pretty much satisfied the both of us for the time being, and I wasn't feeling so very much like a pudding any more, so I made myself into an inchworm and rolled out of the bed. Again, like I said, I probably could have run around half naked and not had anyone complain, but I took the time and trouble to put my clothes on, shirt and socks and shoes and all the other little accouterments of a fine lady such as myself, and then I left him lying in the bed while I went to find Ashura because I had already decided how we should spend the rest of the hours that were so fast slipping away. She smiled when I asked her what I asked her, and it was like drops of moolight like warm milk running in my blood.

She said, "You should check the bottom drawer."

I wasn't exactly sure what she meant, so I went back to the room in Rin's Calm Lands, which had the only drawers I could remember seeing in this place. Auron had stepped out for a moment, I guess to powder his nose, so I hunched down on my knees and checked the bottom drawer of the chest that matched the map bed.

Ashura. I loved her then more than I had before, and that's like adding to a number already too big to write in scientific notation. As if anyone ever doubted she was the best and most amazing mom ever. In the drawer were a dozen carefully folded sun dresses trimmed with lace and ribbons and frills -- light and easy and comfortable, like wearing a shift -- in sky blue and powder blue and sunshine yellow and golden yellow and bright orange and royal blue and all of the other favorite colors I have ever had. I am sorry that here I must confess that although I am a cool and awesome mechanic, synthsmith genius, and gunslinger, I am also maybe the girliest girl that ever was a girl. Maybe you could have guessed this from the fact that I wear the best socks ever and giant trailing ribbons on the back of my otherwise pretty functional shirt. I gotta be careful when I wear those things around engines. Also, my shorts are trimmed with ruffles. Let's be honest. I am no kinds of butch.

So I wriggled out of my clothes without thinking too much about it and then spent the next ten minutes wriggling into one dress and then another, trying to decide which to wear. I settled on the powder blue one because I was feeling that color -- the color of the sky when a kite is soaring high through the clouds.

When I found Auron again he had already finished putting on his face, so I grabbed his hand and dragged him out into the main hall where the ground still had little puddles of tidepool life in the places where the tile made low spots. If he liked my new look he didn't say anything about it, but I get a feeling that he did like it, because I'm pretty sure he would have definitely said something if he _didn't_. Something like _Rikku, that is not appropriate to wear out to an area where we might be attacked by fiends._ I told you he's not a total killjoy.

Ashura had left the picnic basket on the rug that was all covered over with sea animals, both those that had been woven in and those that had been left behind when the water receded. I guessed that Leviathan would unsummon them after he got tired of smelling them, but considering his warm affection for my vomit I wasn't entirely optimistic that this would be any time soon. Maybe he was leaving them for us: spoils from our victory. If that was the case I didn't really have any idea how I was going to politely tell him that I wasn't planning on keeping all the krill and brine shrimp and starfish and mollusks. You may be thinking _Why Rikku, I have never known you to stand on ceremony with princess goldfish snake_ and this is true enough, but I had been cut a break, so I felt it was only reasonable to return the favor. I was kind of in love with everything at the time. You know what it's like when you feel that way. Yesterday I had died and been born again. Only like, _really_.

Rotting fish and my effervescent joy aside, I picked up the blanket and I made him carry the basket and we set out for the beach.

We walked for a long time around the rim of the bay, climbing up and down rocks, stopping to look at things I thought were interesting, and sometimes I would sing the choruses of those sea shanties I love, only not so loud and desperate this time around. We hiked along the beach for maybe two hours and still Indara never slipped out of sight, or never even seemed to move, really, and I got the feeling if we turned around and walked back the other direction we'd come upon the gossamer and spiderweb bridge after only a few minutes. Summoned places seem to be like that, really. It may seem endlessly giantastic, but that's just because you keep lapping yourself.

Finally I decided I didn't really care that much about our privacy and I found a nice spot and laid out the blanket near some standing rocks it would maybe be nice to lean against or climb on, depending on how we were feeling. He put down the basket and I threw myself down and then he came to sit beside me.

And then we talked, or I talked at least. I told him everything I could think of, about being a little girl and a heretic because of my eyes or because of who my parents were, and I told him about chasing butterflies and about the first time my pops took me into a ruin. I told him about Home and my room with the painted picture window and the yellow chocobo curtains, and I told him about working during the summers for Rin and how he'd promised to marry me when I was all grown up, and then I told him how I'd found someone even better than Rin and he asked who that was and I just laughed and laughed and leaned against him because he was huge and warm and steady.

I told him about when my Uncle Braskie had died and then he talked a little, and then we did a little remembering together and I think he might have been a little embarrassed. But then I told him that I couldn't remember when I had started loving him, and thinking back couldn't really think of a time when I hadn't, although maybe I hadn't understood it all at the time, and then I confessed that there are maybe a lot of things I don't really understand at the time, like when I wanted to carry Yunie away in the beginning or when I had run off angry and crying when we'd first started all of this, and then he told me that that was all right, and it was different than when he said "It's all right" to anyone else, because it didn't feel like whistling in the dark any more, not even whistling from a Legendary Guardian. It felt like it _meant_, like he wanted the parts of me that made me _me _that maybe he hadn't before, or maybe he hadn't understood it then, or maybe I hadn't. When he said it this time it felt like _Don't apologize for being yourself._

And I told him about all the things I wanted for the future, all the things I wanted for everyone: peace and safety from terror and death, a time to laugh that wasn't punctuated by constant and agonized mourning. I told him I wanted a day when the sun would rise and there would be no more Sin, no more misery, no more people dead for no reason, so people could start living again outside that shadow and live the way people ought to live. I told him that I wanted a day when everybody was as free as an Al Bhed to do what they thought was right and not be punished for it, and I told him I wanted to have a new Home, where all the people of the Al Bhed could come and go freely.

I told him how I wanted Yunie and Tidus to be happy together, to live in a little house in Besaid and have a crowd of impossibly adorable and impossibly silly little kids, for Tidus to teach them all to play blitzball and for Besaid to field the first professional team composed solely of members of his family. I told him how I wanted to teach Yunie how to swim and maybe how to shoot and how I wanted her to teach me how to sing, _really sing._ I told him how I wanted Lulu and Wakka to live next door, and maybe all their kids would be born with breasts and rooster tails for hair and then he laughed when I did my best mime of what such a child would look like. I told him how I wanted Kimarhi to go back among the Ronso and for them to crown him king, or chief, or whatever, and for him to meet a nice Ronso lady and have a bunch of little blue kittens that I could cuddle and cuddle at least until they were five or six, when they might be big enough to cuddle me without my consent.

And then I got a little shy because I had said a lot and he hadn't said very much, so I apologized for hitting him in the head with my gun the first time, and I apologized again for being so filled with hate and fear when I had first found out what he had been trying to keep from me. He didn't say anything much then either, just put his arm around me and pulled me so we were shoulder to shoulder and gave me a long squeeze.

"I want to thank you," he said at last.

"For what?" I asked.

"For loving me despite," he said. "I didn't know I needed it until I did."

I shook my head, "Then you shouldn't because I don't. I love you because. Because, because, oh I can't even think. For so many reasons. I can't ask you to be less than you are, even if it would be easier. I would never wish you that way, even if it meant you'd be alive now instead of not. I don't want you to give up because now I understand that that's not like you. I don't want you to ever give up. Don't be afraid," I said, and maybe that sounded really silly, me telling him that, but maybe it wasn't so very, "Nobody can ever take away the you that's in my heart, no matter what happens. And no one can take away the me that's in your heart. I never thought that it would be this way, I'll be square with you. But I can't spend all my time wishing it were different, because maybe then it wouldn't have happened this way and we wouldn't have anything at all. And if I spent my time regretting all of that I wouldn't have any time left to love you now when I can, to see how it is when you really smile, to feel the knuckles on your hand under my fingers, to do a million pointless wonderful things, things that I can only do when you're here and I'm here. I know you can't promise me how long we'll have, but no one can. That's all right. I think that's always been all right."

I had said a lot again and he hadn't said anything, so I looked down, but then he said, "I admire your strength. And resourcefulness, but perhaps most, your faith. That is something I lost long ago."

"My pops says _Uhmo po vymmehk tu fa maynh du kad ib." _I explained, "Everyone has it broken, has their faith maybe maimed and crippled, and it hurts so you never want to believe in anything again. He says you can't really start to love, you won't ever really truly believe until it's been broken. When it's broken, when you have nothing, that's when you begin again, and it's always stronger, your heart, your faith. It's always stronger. I think you have faith too, you just need to find it again. Even if it's just a little candle in your heart, if you care for it it'll grow and grow until it can light up all the people around you when theirs have gone out." I stopped and smiled a little, "I think Yunie's like that. She's a good person. Everybody loves her. I wish I could be like that."

"You are like that," he said, and he said it so gravely, like he does, that I didn't know what to say. Then he went on, "But also different, since you are not Yuna. But in this way, I think you're not so different."

"Then," I said, "Let me tell you what I want. I want to have a new Home but maybe live on an airship half the time, like I always have. I love the sky and the water. And I want to have a million more adventures, only all fun this time, and I want to go visit everyone all the time, and maybe carry Yunie away once in a while. And I want to have a lot of kids. I always have."

"Rikku," he said, but I wasn't listening yet. On purpose.

"And I want to take them around on adventures with us. When they're little I'll tie them up in little papoose bags and hang them off of you like ornaments on a tree -- "

"Rikku."

"I kind of wonder who has the dominant genes -- I mean, if we'll get more tanks or rollerskates, or if we'll get sort of rollerskate-tanks -- "

"_Rikku_."

I finally stopped because I could tell I was making him upset.

He didn't say anything at first, then quietly started, "If you want to have children, then I want you to have children, but I don't want you to pin your hopes on something that cannot happen because it isn't possible. I am dead. Regardless of when I'm sent I cannot father any children -- "

"If you start out your dreams by writing out at length what can't happen because it isn't possible, then I'm not sure how much dream you -- or anyone else -- will have left. So don't say 'can't' and don't say 'won't'. If I can't dream for it then I know it'll never happen, but if I can then somehow it might. Ashura told me that princesses make fairy tales, and not the other way around. So maybe I'll make one. The world is a pretty big place. Maybe you've noticed that."

He closed his eye and seemed to be choosing his words carefully. "If it doesn't happen, I'm afraid you will be more hurt if you have pinned all your dreams on it."

"Then it'll hurt," I said, "And I'll know how much I wanted it because that's just how much it will hurt, so I'll never have to forget that dream. But any person can have as many dreams as they can think of. We're not limited to just one. I dunno if you know that or not. And I know that some of them will come true. Some of them always do. You've helped some of them come true yourself. To protect Yuna. To fall in love, really in love. To be loved. All of those are my important dreams too."

He looked as serious as a priest who does not get enough fiber in his diet, so I helpfully appended, "To ride the Shoopuf ten times in a row -- although you really hindered more than helped me with that one."

"You kept giving away our gear," he replied dryly, and I knew I had him away from the yawning chasm of moody emotive despair.

"Well, what do we need all that stuff for anyway?"

"To kill fiends?" He suggested, and it wasn't really so much a suggestion as it was _you know I am correct_. _ This is what they pay me for: to be correct. I am Legendary Guardian Always Right._

"Maybe we should just start trying to solve our problems with peaceful negotiation," I suggested helpfully, "And then throw our Al Bhed dictionaries at them if that doesn't work. I bet Yuna would totally agree to this plan."

"That is the reason," he said, and moved suddenly to pin me to the blanket, "That you and Yuna are not allowed to make the plans. Now," and he had that look, you know that look he gets, that _look_, "Let's begin working on another of your dreams."

-

It was late when we got back. Or maybe it wasn't. I dunno really how time passed down there, other than through beats of the hymn. I assume it was late because it was dim and quiet, and neither unfrozen guado lawyer or the Lady came out to welcome us back. Maybe that's what Leviathan had really meant: a day of rest _from him._ We left the picnic things where we had originally found them and went back to the room in the Calm Lands, where I could look out the window and see real fireflies dancing in the dusk. The breeze through the window was cool, and instead of spherelight the whole place was lighted by fat wax candles in all sorts of mismatched plates and dishes, all from the different sets we used to use to feed everybody at Home. It was a nice touch for this last night, this ending to the day of rest.

Still, I couldn't really spend the rest of the night lounging around in my underwear and doin' a whole lotta nothing, no matter how provocative a prospect that was. If we were going to get through tomorrow, then I was going to have to do some more synthing. I went to where he had stowed my pack and started digging through my bags and pouches and satchels. While I was so occupied, he went to his own pack and took out a worn leather case.

He brought the case back to me and unfolded it carefully and then gave me what was that he kept inside it.

"I want you to have this," he said, to make his intentions clear.

It was smooth metal, beautiful, unmarked, and tensile tight but flexible, I could feel that just by holding it, and it was light. It was so light weight it could have been made of air or fairy wings. It was maybe the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, the way it glistened like burnished gold when the candlelight flickered over it.

"It's a targe," I said stupidly, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"It's a targe," he confirmed, and we just stood there staring at one another.

"You know this is tetra class metal, don't you? Do you know how much this thing is worth?" I was suddenly laughing, like I'd just gotten ten buckets of ice cream, and I had. There are few things I covet more than naked potential just lying there and waiting for me to make something out of it. "How long have you had this?"

"Since the adamantoise. It was with the spheres he left behind."

"Well I guess I'll have to thank that ol' horn turtle for that find. But if you've had it since then, then why did you give it to me earlier? It better not be out of spite. You know I've been synthing this whole time."

"I thought it was wisest to save it until the last."

"The last," I repeated absently, but then I shook my head to clear it out, rubbing my knuckles in my hair. "Well, that did stop me from synthing it up before, maybe without a lot of advance planning. In a lot of ways fighting Ashura is going to be a lot harder than fighting Leviathan. I mean, Leviathan was scary and all and it sure didn't help that you can't swim, but at least he's all wallowing in water all the time. I know thunder," (here I shuddered appropriately) "is gonna fry him if I hit him with it enough times, and I know if I synth right I can eat everything he throws at me that's not his snapping teeth or his flailing tail. But Ashura, it's not going to be that simple with her. I really don't know what to expect. I guess that means I have to be fifty times more prepared." I grabbed onto my ponytail and shook my head again forcibly by the roots and then looked at the targe. "But don't worry. I got kind of _a plan_."

He raised one eyebrow and didn't say anything at first but I must have looked so put out at that point that he felt he had to at least pretend.

"I am reassured," he said. He didn't really _sound _very reassured. I guess I was going to have to make do with that.

I flopped down on the floor of the master suite of Rin's Calm Lands, and sitting in the circle of that candleglow like I was some kind of ancient warlock weaving my spells, I unpacked my bags again and started sorting everything in piles.

"I am going to make this my engagement ring," I announced conversationally, then thought about it again and admitted, "Um. Targe."

"Do that," he said, so I decided to press my luck. You may have noticed I pretty much always do that.

"What if I said I wanted to make it my wedding targe?"

"What is an Al Bhed wedding like?" he asked absently, "I have no idea." Auron? Totally culturally sensitive. Except not.

"Well, first off we lock the bride up in a chest of drawers. Then everybody strips naked and then paints themselves blue. Then everybody lines up in two lines with clubs and sticks and pitchforks and then the bride and groom have to run between us while we beat them -- "

He was still listening silently so I rolled my eyes.

"No really, Al Bhed weddings are pretty much like weddings anywhere else, duh. Everybody gets together and two people stand up in front and the first one promises to protect and cherish and love the other one forever and ever, or something, and then the other person says the same thing, then they make out. And then we have a big party. That's pretty much it."

"That's all you have to do to get married?" he asked, and he still sounded pretty dubious so I put my hands on my hips.

"No, we also gotta exchange little vials of bile or otherwise it's not official. Yes, that's all you have to do. They don't make it hard or complicated. It's not like we want to discourage people from getting together and being happy and maybe making little Al Bhed babies, not with Sin around all the time." I was about to ask him what marriages in Yevon were like, not like I really figured he knew, since I was pretty sure he didn't have that kind of experience with the church, but he spoke before I could.

"If that's all it takes," and here he was measured and slow, as if saying it were difficult, as if everything were difficult, "Then we'll do that. After we've defeated Sin."

"We will," I agreed, and I smiled and it was hurt and crying and love all at once, and I blinked back the tears hard and laughed, "I bet everybody's gonna be really surprised when we're the first ones to get married. And we have to be the first otherwise it won't be so much like winning. Promise."

"I promise," he said, and that was good enough for me. Man. My pops is gonna blow ten kinds of fuses when I tell him who I'm planning on marrying, and that he's already pretty much completely dead. Maybe I'll pretend it's a hypello first and then I'll reveal it's Auron and he'll be totally relieved, only with my luck this will totally backfire. I bet I can get Rin on my side. He's always respected Auron. Plus I have, over the years, cleaned so much chocobo poop out of his travel agencies that he owes me like ten billion favors anyway. There are some things gil can't buy, and a chocobo poop scooper that's always cheerful and happy and never forgets to smile at customers is one of them.

You may think I'm counting chocobos before they're hatched now, but that's okay, because I had decided to wish my hardest for it, for this, for all of it, and beyond wishing I had decided to do anything and everything I could to _make _it come true. I was so in love with him then, grave and serious and smug and horrible and trying to be kind to me, the way he knew how. I still am. I don't think I'll ever stop loving him. I don't think that's even possible. He's just like that. I'm just like that, maybe. I don't want to say that we happened to come together because of destiny or the stars or the wheel of fate or anything like that, since I think it happened because we made it happen. It wasn't just handed to either of us more than anything else has ever been. But there's just certain parts of me and certain parts of him that go together like a dovetail joint, I know that now. I've seen it in action. I've felt it. Maybe even more than I needed or wanted him, or even more than he needed or wanted me, there was this kind of hastened reaction when we came together so everything seemed to increase, exponentially even, so I'm pretty sure that how much we needed and wanted _each other _was so high that if you tried to take a reading of it with a super high capacity scanner? It would make that thing explode in your face. I just think some people are like that together. Not so much meant to be together as _meaning _to be together come Sin or high water. Trust me. I understand about these things.

Of course, while I took the time to tell you about all this my hands haven't exactly been idle -- are you thinking something inappropriate again? Sheesh, I mean synthing. By this point I had everything I had and even everything Auron had sorted out into these little shining, glistening piles: feathers and grit and silk and sand and little bits of paper and someone's old wallet and all these old rusted things that look like they come from your grandma's side-of-the-highroad sale. Only I know for sure that Grandma Kettie has like, a billion times more of this stuff than I could ever carry around just on my back. More than Auron could carry around on _his _back. By the time you become an Al Bhed grandma you have generally solved problems like how to cart around your delirious amount of _junk_. Here is a hint as to how my grandma solved it: _airship_.

I steadied the targe between my knees and was about to start the magic when I thought about it again, put my new targe gently down on the ground like it was a newborn baby, and then wriggled out of my ruffly sun dress. Synthing is both delicate and sometimes horribly messy work. I didn't want to get my new favorite dress all mucky from it. I thought he wasn't going to say anything as I tossed him the dress and settled back on the floor among my other treasures, but he turned his head a little to the side and didn't so much ask as tell.

"Isn't that dress summoned."

I shrugged. "That doesn't mean that I should just treat it like it has no value, right? This whole place is summoned. I ate a lot of summoned blueberry pancakes. Ultimately Leviathan and Ashura are summoned. I think maybe something that's summoned is made out of the love and care of the person who summons it. That means we should treasure it, not use it just however."

He was quiet for a while, thinking I guess, and I started to work in the meantime. Finally he shrugged. "I suppose."

Of course he did. I told you. I understand about these things.

I worked for a long time, so that the candles sweat themselves down into stubs and my eyes hurt from straining, even with my goggles on. The muscles in my neck got tense and ached, but then they didn't ache so much any more because he moved until he was behind me and then started to work his thumbs into the knots. I made a tired sound and leaned back into his hands as he did.

"You know," I said, "I think you should maybe think about doing that professionally." I thought about it. "So did you ever give Braska back rubs? Is that part of the guardian thing? Did you ever give Jecht back rubs when he was all cranky? Huh? Didja?"

"No," he said shortly, "I did not." And that was the end of that.

Leaning back into his hands I thought about the work I'd done, about the day we'd spent, all the things I'd said, all the things he'd said, how far we'd gone, and how far we'd come.

"I'm glad I bet my leg." I said at last. "I'm glad I'm pretty lousy at poker."

"I'm ready to renounce my claim on it," he said very seriously into the back of my neck.

I closed my eyes. "Really? Why? It's a good leg."

"I'm trading it in," he said, and I realized my synthing for the night was pretty much over. "I'd rather have the title for something else."

-


	11. Chptr Ten: Showdown: All in, Cards speak

It was the next morning, or maybe it wasn't. The Calm Lands had gotten dark and then they'd gotten light again. We'd snuffed out all the candles and then occupied ourselves the way respectable people are supposed to after dark, say, when they're sleeping in the same bed and it's not like when Tidus and Wakka are sharing because there aren't enough to go around.

Hey, don't look at me expecting all these juicy details. _A lady never tells._ This is not that kind of story!

Well, okay, maybe it totally is, but I'll make a deal with you. When you start sharing the fantastic details of your sex life with me, I'll quid pro ya' -- and boy, can I tell some stories, and not just my own, either. For some reason, I guess because my boyfriend is dead and people figure I'm all weepy and lonely and starved to hear about any kind of physical contact, people just unload all their steamy and delicate secrets on me. You know what I wasn't ready to hear about? Paine and Gippal and Bara -- okay, no. I need to just stop talking about this before I derail even further.

Anyway. What was I talking about again? Oh right, not telling you about my sex life. Maybe if you give me all your gil.

No? Okay then.

It was the next morning, I guess. It was orange like dawn instead of like sunset and I stood barefoot in the black sand and let the waves lap up around my ankles. It was my last day to wear one of my sun dresses, so I picked a pale green one the color of one of those queen moths. You know what I'm talking about, the ones the color of melon with those moonspots on their wings. Speaking of, there had been a bowl of melon waiting for me when I woke up. Ashura's excellent room service, I guess because she figured that when next we met it would be for the last time.

I had woken up with my ankles cuffed together by one of the belts from his gi, but he'd still been sound asleep, or faking it at least, so I'd unbuckled myself, had some melon, wriggled into a dress and then gone down to the beach. He could explain that later, and I figured he would. I mean, we weren't even sleeping on the edge of a terrifying and bottomless abyss this time. But I told you before. I don't know if _Auron _even knows with Auron sometimes.

So I stood there and listened to the water on the rocks, felt the tide lapping at my feet, and watched the little fish dart around in the shallows. I had my back to the fairy bridge purposefully, mainly so that if Levi came strolling out he would see that I was deep in contemplation and maybe leave me alone for once.

Of course, it wasn't Levi that came strolling out, was it?

"You gonna tell me about why I got the belt treatment, or just leave me in desperate and scintillating suspense?" I asked.

"I got tired of your foot in the small of my back, kicking the backs of my knees, kicking my shins, kicking the base of my spine -- " his list was exacting and numbered, I could tell, and he was prepared to go on for a while.

I held up my hands, "Okay, okay, I read you, big man. I guess I do sometimes have the problem of having an _active dreamlife_."

"It's all right," he said flatly, "It is something I will learn to deal with."

"Really?" I asked.

"I have plenty of belts," he said, and that pretty much satisfied my curiosity on that one.

We were still for a little while then, watching the surf, listening to the water, listening to the hymn.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked as he moved to stand at my back.

"Tomorrow," I chirped like a songbird, because I am Princess Aurora of the Al Bhed and I can do things like that, or at least I like to pretend I can.

"Tomorrow," he repeated, and dwelt on that for a moment. "Not today?"

"Nope," I said, letting my hand flutter up to wave him off. "Not yesterday either. I'm not worried about that. After all, I got you, babe. _Syho ryhtc syga mekrd fung_, and all that. We'll do this because there's no other way for it to happen. It's like beating Sin. We'll do what we can, everything we can, and that will be enough, because if it's not, that's all she wrote, right? Well, I don't think it is. My pops would say, _Ed yeh'd dra fyo dra funmt'c syta. _Someday we'll go into the sun, and maybe that day's not too far away."

"I would say, 'Wishing doesn't change the world,'" he said gravely, then stopped.

"But?" I asked, because well, there had to be, didn't there? We were in a world made of wishes, inhabited by wishes, and we had devoured wishes to give us strength. What Yuna has? Maybe what every summoner has, or is trying to find? _Faith. Belief. Wishing power._

"Maybe it does," he finished, and that was all _he _wrote.

"You'd better believe it," I laughed.

**The Shape of his Heart**

**By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )**

**Chapter Ten: Showdown: All in, cards speak**

It was different somehow, completely different now than when Leviathan had stood waiting for us at the crossing of the nave and transept. The whole place was eerily quiet, and although I knew the torrent of water went on uninterrupted all around us down the exterior walls of the temple, here, the sound was strangely muffled, like it might have been the faint patter of rain and nothing more. I had the intense impression that I was in the presence of something ancient and dangerously pure, like a flame that burns at such a high temperature it'll take your arm off, bone and all and cauterize the wound as it does, so you're without an arm and it looks as if it's never been there.

The tiled floor was bare, all of Leviathan's little decomposing sea creatures and microclimate tidepools gone as if they had never studded the floor. The torches along the wall bloomed blue-white, and then moon golden and suddenly the seams between the tiles caught up their radiance and I realized that what I had taken for mortar between Leviathan's tiles of aquamarine and lapis was a mosaic of spiderweb lines of diamonds and moonstones. As they lit up in brilliance, with the crossing in the center of their diamond dewdrop pattern, the tiles fell away into shadow and the golden light streaming through the rose window outlined two figures barefoot on the rug. Leviathan was kneeling, on one knee, eyes closed. The king of the summons had bowed his head and knelt in the service of his lady. Around us the hymn braided up like strands of silk and I could feel his reverence in every word, and I wanted to fall to my knees beside him.

Because _she _was standing there still and perfect, skin like alabaster, hair like cornsilk studded with the stars of her hairpins. She opened her amber eyes slowly and I could hear Auron clear his throat, trying to find his voice to let his challenge boom across the space, but I touched his arm and shook my head. He looked at me then, maybe hard and maybe soft, I can't really say, but he stepped back and I slowly stepped forward and folded my hands in front of me and tried to imagine what it must be like to have Yuna's strength, to have Yuna's way of knowing what to say and how to say it.

"It's time," I said, and somehow my voice rang like a bell, carrying clearly in the silence, so I sounded not so much like ten parts a spazz and three parts a disaster waiting to happen, but like something else, maybe like that princess I've been trying so hard at pretending to be since I was five years old. "It's time," I said, "For all the deeds of the past to be reckoned. We have come to seal our pact, Fayth of Indara. We have come to finish things."

She smiled and it was strange, a flicker.

"I hope you have prepared yourself," she said, and raised one slender hand to point squarely at me as she closed her eyes again, "Because I will kill you. Commend your souls now, because there will be no one to send you." She opened her eyes again and looked at me, looked at us, and it was like a hundred golden needles through my heart, "The you that is here will die. The you that has never been will come to be. I will be the one to finish things."

She snapped her fingers, crisp, a momentary sound like a crystal ornament falling to the floor, and I felt that same soul-rise of holy cure filling me up inside and out, lifting me out of myself and into myself, into everything, she and Auron and Leviathan, this place, the Summoned Sea, a world under the skin of the world, lifting me into everything and driving me deeper than I could have imagined going, and it hurt like music and sunshine, like having all of me pulled to its fullness, as if I could burst into full blossom, right then and there, and I felt like crying. I felt like falling down and crying over everything from the beginning, each moment like the beat of my heart, like the beat of the song, memories rising around me, through me, and letting me settle down at last onto my feet, into my self as I was. Such was Ashura's final mercy.

"The doorway to heaven is open," Leviathan said, then stood and bowed his head to us once and melted into the flickering shadows, to watch and yet not be seen.

"It is time," she said. "I am sorry that this shall be the end, but make no mistake. It shall be the end," she said, and then faintly I heard, "All dreams must end. Here is your quiet night."

And she had rippled into nothing, into the throb of the music, into the heat shimmer of the torches, rippled upward, rippled outward, fair and terrible like glass being blown in the hot air. In that first moment it was both Ashura and something other, but then that had gone into nothing and the All Holy was upon us.

I don't know what it was that I imagined Ashura's otherself would look like, in all the moments that had passed by me before. Indara had no shortage of depictions of its king, but curiously none of its queen, the diamond Lady, the moonstone lady. It was then maybe that I understood, that I _knew_, that some things you just don't depict, even in a holy place, even in a sanctuary of the fayth.

She was tall, slender like a whippet, or maybe like a birch woman, the kind I used to look at in fairy tale picturebooks, as if she had been planted in the earth and then grown to that lovely and impossible height. She turned her head and the stones that hung from her crown chimed like bells, and her hands fluttered like live doves on the tethers of her wrists and her own cure burned up the air around her, carving halos and roses of holy frost in the air around her.

I was already twisting to turn back towards Auron, feathers between my fingers, and it was an impossible moment, slow and terrible as I brushed the feather against his cheek and he caught the pulse of haste because suddenly something seized me by my arm, wrenching me up off the ground so that I hung there, as if this were the gallows where Yevon could finally hang me as a witch.

A thing held me, a thing held me like I was some piece of filth, or nothing at all, it was, it was, it was a terrible thing, with red hair like a demon's mane and eyes bloodshot, yellow like a cat's eyes, only rimmed around with black, devil's shadow, and it opened its mouth and it had teeth, it had teeth, these _teeth _and its skin was like clay that had baked ten thousand years in a furnace, and it shook me like it would shake the bones from my tendons, shake all of me out of joint so I fell in so many pieces that there would never be any Rikku again, and then it screamed. It _screamed_.

And then it laughed.

"I will paint myself with your blood, Rikku Cidolphus. _I will paint myself with your blood."_

And then I screamed. I screamed and screamed and _screamed _because I couldn't think of anything else, just the screaming, the seizure running, like I was a lizard who could lose its tail to get away from a bird, like I had a skin to leave behind that wouldn't spill my insides out everywhere, and something must have happened, might have happened, because I was scrabbling across the ground on all fours, thinking of nothing, thinking of nothing, just screaming and screaming and screaming and --

A bottle broke over my head, making my skull smart and my eyes bulge as cold syrup matted my hair and slipped down my neck. I could breathe. I could breathe.

And then I saw.

The great red thing was towering above me, bearing down, teeth and hair and those mad yellow eyes, and I was on the ground, on my hands and knees, my belly pressed to the stone. He was standing above me, between us, the neck of the bottle of remedy he'd broken over my head still hanging jagged from his hand, pressed back but still standing, still standing, the old wicked blade of the muramasa bearing the brunt of a bloody scimitar that was longer from curve to hilt than the length of his body.

"_Rikku_," he grunted, husky and strained, but I was already moving, rolling to get out from under him so that he was free to move. And he did move, putting his shoulder behind the blade and somehow throwing her off of him so that she fell back a step and he lunged forward and struck. It was a heavy blow and she staggered, or at least I thought she staggered, but instead she was shimmering, like heat off the desert ruins in the zenith of the day, and somehow it wasn't the terrible red thing any longer, but instead the white lady again, and the doves fluttered again and her high cure knit her whole, perfect, and peerless.

I was going to have to do something about that. I finally got my feet again and let the haste pulse through me as the last feather from Frances fluttered into nothing, then I dug my fingers deep inside my side satchel and came up with what I wanted, a silk net like the sky full of stars. I didn't stop to think, didn't let myself wonder what would happen to me if the red monster came back, just gritted my teeth and charged right at her, leaping as I spread my net on the ambient magic in the air and let it fall over her, cleaving to her skin across the bare marble of her breast. A heartbeat gone, and then it burst into far spread points of wine light, and I knew I had caught her in my reflect.

I skidded to a halt on the far side of her, wheeling to dig my fingers into my bag again, but she was already shimmering, and the white lady was gone leaving a somber blue dancer in her place. She held a golden scale made of a thousand spinning, moving cogs by one granite finger, and when she looked at me I felt I had been pinned by iron gone red hot in a fire.

"That will not work," she said, and the wheels in the scale spun into a blur of action and reaction, a turn forward and a rapid recoil back. "I am the balance on which the world hangs. You cannot slay me."

And the wheels and cogs stopped suddenly as if all the little particles in the air around had gone frozen, and a thousand prisms split the light around her and my reflect dissolved before her dispel.

Then I swallowed the fear that had built like a dead thing at the back of my throat and dug and dug into my bag of treasures, my sack of things the dead left behind them, the things I sift out of them before their last and final rest, my bags and parcels filled with nothing but personal effects, last rites, and dying wishes.

There are things that the human mind knows, my pops says, and there are things that the human mind _knows _that it doesn't know that it knows. If my brain is a web of lines tying all my memories, all my thoughts together, all the things I can think and will think, then there are way, way too many of those little threads linking moment to moment for me to ever really understand them all. So there are plenty of those little connections, things that I _know _that I don't know that I know, that maybe I'll never, ever be aware of. I think the human mind is an impossibly large place -- bright, pulsing, a network, a star that pumps like a heart. My pops once told me that they called those things quasars in the old days.

But there are times when you're torn to the limit, when you're strained as hard as you can strain against yourself, when you've maybe got more adrenaline pulsing through your veins than blood, when you're burning up a white-hot high -- a quasar high -- and in those moments you can _understand_.

I fell backwards into it, into the understanding, feeling my fingers digging through my bags as if my hands had hearts and minds and eyes of their own, and I drew blind, like I was drawing cards again, and there was a grain of sand that weighed more than Spira, that might break my spine and all of my bones and carry me through the belly of the world and out the other side, but I held it, I held it like a bare burning flame in the palm of my hand. In my other hand a marble sputtered electricity, jolting through me like I was a circuit.

And then I clapped my hands together like I could call the end of everything.

And a jolt with a shorter wave than electricity rippled through me, seizing me up, and it was like all my nerves fired at once, fired impossibly, tightened every coil of my body so I became a precision fighting machine. I felt like I was walking a tightrope of murder, and I knew it was the same for him.

I don't know if you've ever watched him move, I mean _really move_. Tidus likes to say that he charges into everything and leaves us to run flailing after in his wake, but maybe that's not really it. He doesn't have to think about what he does ahead of time because he _thinks _with his body. If you've ever really watched him move, you'll understand what I mean. He thinks with his body and he feels with his body. The thinking he's always done, and maybe the feeling he had to learn, or maybe it just comes naturally. When he loved me he _loved _me, and there was no thinking about it. Maybe that's why I stopped being afraid. Maybe that's why I'm still not afraid even now.

He had engaged her, captured her attention fully, that red monster with the seven foot blade, and theirs was an exchange of steel. Blow for blow he caught and parried her strokes, and sparks like pyreflies struck off in the air when their blades met. And she pressed him, pressed him like she would back him into a corner, but he's a swordsman, the best fencer I have ever known, and he kept on his feet, melting in and out of her zoned rage while she reared to strike him like a snake. But he was like water, or the breath of wind, and somehow he moved between her strikes, flowing like a haze, his sword like a lash, each blow with the force of a hurricane behind it, so that it was like a lightning strike pitting the ground and fusing up the sand when his sword struck her strange stony soul-skin.

I knew then what I had to do, knew what it was that would save us if I could just spread the net. So I crept up on that terrible thing while her sword sang against his blade, crept up on her and let my starry silk brush like a breath of nothing against her back -- and then, so she would know I was there, would figure my intentions, I dug my hands into her deepest secrets, not for want of finding anything, but just to draw her attention. My hands came away curiously full when I had figured them empty, my fist closed tight around something small and hard, like a hunk of coal or marble.

And then he had thrown his shoulder into me, sending me sprawling behind him as he took another strike that she had meant for me, to cleave me clean through, to let out my blood. _She would paint herself._

He panted and I could see he was bleeding, blood running down one arm and making his palm sticky like it was covered in red glue. _Here is the tie that binds us_, I thought, and I found it there in my bags, the silver minaret of an elixir, and I wrenched off the top and slung it over him so that it rained like fairy water. He didn't spare a moment to look at me then because neither of us had a moment to spare, but it was there, laid bare between us. _I have given you all my best._

He dodged her strike and then he struck, and I had lost my fear, so I struck, and then he struck, and I danced past the blade that sang so close it took away the end of one of my braids with it as I spun around.

And then he sank his sword into her so that she screamed, and then she was fury, impossible fury as she put her own clawed hand around the hilt of his sword and dragged it out of his mortal hands, pushing it first deeper into her belly and then pulling it out, slick with the blood that was as clay red as her skin. She threw his sword away then and I heard it clatter against a wall forever-far-away as she shimmered and she shimmered, the white lady pulsing up in her own quasar and I couldn't think, I couldn't think, _I couldn't move fast enough_ -- and then I found it there between my fingers, a curtain made of moonbeams, and I threw myself against him and pulled it over both of us as we hit the floor hard and the All Holy exploded into white hot light and fury, turning everything to stardust and burning like it would sear the flesh from my bones. I might have screamed then, screamed then and not known it, never heard it, because there was a high, keening pulse like music in the air, although it was a song I didn't know.

And it had maybe seared all my skin off into ash, but I was breathing, I was breathing, maybe only just, _but I was_ _breathing_, and as I struggled to untangle myself from the skein of lunar silk that had saved our lives I saw her hands flutter, felt the holy cure ripple through the air, saw the magic splash against her reflect like it was water running down channeled steel, felt it fill me up again, felt it fill me up deep, knew it had washed over him too as I felt his strong, steady hand on my arm as he got to his feet, saw her, saw her shimmering, shimmering back to that blue dancer, to her scales and her dispel, but then his hand on my arm was strength, his strength, all of it in me, for me, all of everything, each moment that_ had been _like a flame, like my pulse, and it was just enough, _it was just enough_.

I palmed another heavy grain of sand from somewhere lost at the bottom of my bag and he pressed a stone that was as cold as December into my other palm and I threw myself back against him as I brought them together and my supernova split the room, throwing us both against the wall so hard it left a spiderweb of impact fracture. He took my weight, kept my spindly rollerskate body from cracking into shards against the marble, but at this we were finally both spent, and I had begun digging feebly for some kind of potion in my bags when some beautiful alabaster ankles came into my field of vision -- that I was at ankle height should tell you something about my condition -- and then I was lifted up and taken away to heaven.

"You are matchless," she said softly, and it was clear she offered this with genuine respect. I'm not so sure I looked all that matchless, hanging on big red's arm and panting like an asthmatic even after her final cure, but it had all come to an end, from the first moment, to this moment. It had at last come to the final rest. This was our quiet night. And then I couldn't stand it any more and I just wept and wept.

He let me cry, hanging on his arm like I'd never hung on it before, carrying my weight like I was only two ducks and a penny gil, didn't say anything, just put his hand on my back, and maybe I was crying for both of us, crying for all of us, Leviathan and Ashura lost forever in an abandoned temple, the arrogant guado lawyer who'd given up all the things that made him alive, that made him a man, to be with her, Ashura, once upon a time, once not so very long ago she had been a woman, just a woman with a heart big enough to enfold the world inside it. Spira had taken from them and taken from them, just like it had taken from me, had taken from him, taken from everyone, until it was all ten kinds of miracles that we could still stand, that we were still breathing, that I could still smile and laugh and dance and run around buck naked.

"Now you perhaps know," and that was Ashura, quiet like raindrops on the back of my neck, "More than you knew before. This world is worth saving."

"And you have learned this difficult lesson without giving away your life," and that was Leviathan, coming up behind her to lay his long taloned fingers against her white arm, "What it means to live. Even when the path is dark and bleak, even when your path seems long and endless, at last there will be a moment when you come into the light, even if you must rend the sky to let it in. When there is a will, you can always make a way, Rikku of Cidolphus."

I laughed then, weak and exhausted and I finally managed to stand up again on my own two feet, although he kept his hand against my back.

"Now that sounds like something my pops would say."

And then Auron chuckled, low, like a tremor and then rolling, like he'd never get tired of laughing, but then at last he said, "Then maybe he's more intelligent than I gave him credit for."

I thought about it.

"Not really," I said, "Although I guess that depends on what exactly you mean by 'intelligent.' But he's always been a risk taker. He likes to say, _'Huputo ajan vuiht y haf luihdno fedruid mucehk cekrd uv dra cruna_.' It means, like, let me think," I squinched up my eyes, "You'll never find the undiscovered country unless you leave the one you already know. I freely admit he's kind of retarded, but maybe it's the kind of retardation that everybody needs once in a while."

"I think," said Leviathan, and he said it in his Yea-ye-shall-listen-unto-me-for-I-speaketh-the-truth fayth voice, "That it may just be the kind of retardation that could save this world."

-

We went into the center of the temple, the crossing where the nave met the transept, the place of our pacts and challenges, with its tapestry rug figured over with fish and sea titans and other things from the briny depths, the mandala of light where the sun from the rose window left its handprint against the lapis and aquamarine tile of the floor, and Leviathan pulled the rug aside and uncovered a spiral mosaic that fell away in pieces into the darkness. Two figures rose out of that maw, two figures twined together as if they had been dancing at the moment they were flash frozen, a long fingered guado, razor thin, with hair swept back from his forehead, an elegant woman with long, cascading braids and a kind face. They were both like marble, or like marble spun from cobwebs, slick and shimmering and wrapped together as if there could never be any tangling them apart.

"Here we have waited long," said the Leviathan that stood looking at himself, stone frozen in that statue, "But now I think it is time that we are done with the waiting. You have proven yourself worthy, Rikku of Cidolphus, Auron of Faris, by all the laws that have ever bound us, that have ever bound mortal men. If, at one time, Yunalesca Yu granted us a way, now at last we have been given a new way."

Ashura moved and again she tinkled like bells and my heart felt like it would burst just looking at her. She smiled. "You love well enough," she said comfortably, "That I shall be satisfied."

"Now it is the time of the end of Indara," said Leviathan, and his voice split the air like it was knit of magic, "We have closed one compact, and now we shall make a new covenant. Rikku Cidolphus, I would give you a heavy burden to carry. Will you bear it?"

"Um," I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say. But then I thought again about the undiscovered country, and dwelt for a moment on what had happened to me for taking ill-advised bets. Then I stopped. "Hey, you always act like you're so awesome that you know what I'm going to say before I say it, so why are you bothering to ask me now?"

Leviathan looked like he was thinking that over, then he shrugged.

"You have a point. Sworn and witnessed."

"_Hey_," I danced, waving my arms, because now seemed like a really good time to give everyone a reminder about the ants that I keep in my drawers, but Leviathan just ignored my primo dancing and waved nonchalantly in my direction as he turned his attention to Ashura.

She folded her hands before her chest and she looked like the Madonna, golden and fair and diamond tipped. I became so engrossed in watching her that I forgot to keep dancing. After a moment, she spoke.

"Auron Faris, I would also give you a heavy burden to carry. It is nothing easy, in these times of trouble, but I believe I am not mistaken in thinking that you have some experience with bearing a burden alone. Will you do this thing?"

He looked at me, looked at them, and then turned once to look over his shoulder at the great doors standing open and the tangerine glow of the surf behind them. Just then I knew what he would say, knew he could carry the world on his back if someone asked him, knew that nothing could buckle him, and maybe that had always been true, and maybe he hadn't known it before, or maybe just forgotten it and been reminded. It swelled then, in my soul, in my guts, and in the dark places of my insides where my roots are buried.

_I could never ask him to be less than he is._

"Let it be," he said, and that was that. It was final.

"Sworn and witnessed," she said, and then she stepped toward him.

What happened next I'm still not really sure. Even if somebody really versed in the explanation of stuff, like that historian guy Machen, even if he took the time to write out in triplicate what happened then, I'm still not sure I'd understand it. It happened all at once, the hymn blossomed around us, around me, and I could feel it in my heartbeat, could feel it in the blood pulsing at my wrists, and then Leviathan's cool hand was on my arm firmly, a touch that burnt like salt and coral and the sea, and all I could see were storm gray eyes with amber lines like lightning strikes.

And suddenly the cobweb marble statue before us, two figures wrapped in plastic, began to dissolve into sand and the magic burst over us like an explosion of pyreflies, steam and hissing and the strong mother beat of the hymn. I fell to my knees coughing as the sand of the fayth slipped away into nothing, down that deep, endless maw from where it had come.

_Even though I was gentle, you still couldn't keep your feet. Such is just my way,_ I thought.

Then I thought, _Wait. __**I didn't think that.**_

Then I thought, _You certainly are your father's daughter -- and by that I mean that you are not very clever._

Then I pounded myself on the head and cried, "Why am I insulting myself?!"

_"_Leviathan," I head a reproachful voice, gentle in the cradle of my ear, "Be sweet."

I looked up, and I must've been crosseyed or something because Ashura was leaning comfortably against big red's arm, like he had gone and traded me in for a better model. And then I looked down again and I could see those bare guado feet in front of me. Then he leaned down and offered me his hand.

"Okay," I said, scrambling up on my own and ignoring the goldfish queen while he shrugged again, "Somebody gonna tell me what it is exactly that I agreed to ten seconds ago?"

_It won't matter, even if I tell you_, I thought. _It's already done._

"I'm starting to get kind of an impression anyway," I threw my hands up glumly.

"We are sworn, Rikku Cidolphus. Our contract here is ended. We will walk with you so long as you walk. You shall carry us into whatever future Spira may have, and if we are to meet our end, we will all meet it together. Such is an acceptable fate, in my opinion," said Ashura, and that faint smile curled up on her face again like a cat.

_You're honored, I know_, I thought.

I wheeled to face big red, my hands on my hips. "Is he talking to you this way too?"

Auron looked away for a moment, then looked back.

"No," he said. "She's talking to me."

"Aww," I started to dance my ant dance again, utterly distressed, "Aww, aww, _awwwwww_. You mean you got her and I got stuck with, with, with _him? _ _Raw deal_. Raw deal raw deal _raw deal_."

_I am gracious so I am going to pretend you didn't just say that_, he said, only it was to me, in my head.

"Ashura," I clasped my hands in front of me and tried to look the best and sweetest and most charmingly wonderful I have ever looked, "Don't you want to trade? Come on, I'm much nicer than him, I really am."

Auron grunted and she laughed, musical, as if I were the drollest thing that ever were droll.

"It is your place to worship me," she said consolingly, "It is his place to carry me."

_It is your place to worship her_, agreed Leviathan, _You are born under my star, after all. You can't help it._

I sighed.

"This is how it's gonna be, isn't it?" I asked, but I already knew the answer, even before he thought it at me, high and mighty.

"It is," he said, and that was Leviathan.

"It is," he said, and that was Auron.

"It is," she said, and that was Ashura.

"It is," I said, and then I took a deep breath. "And maybe that's all right too."

-

We crossed that fairy bridge of light one last time, and I skipped along the webs of silver floss, and then danced between the streaks like I was playing a game of step-on-a-crack. When we got to the dark sand we all turned back to look at Indara, temple of the Summoned Sea, a cathedral like a marine star set in a fitting wrought of the boiling orange ocean.

Leviathan stood beside me, and then put a hand on my arm, as if he was seeking strength.

"This time has passed away," he said.

"That's what time is meant to do," I said, and he nodded once, and then stepped away and spread his arms wide, as if he could encompass the world in them.

Ashura moved until she was standing behind him, her white hands on his shoulders, and then, they began to sing.

The hymn was still pulsing in my blood, throbbing all around us, as Leviathan had told me it would always, so long as I carried him, but as they began to sing that hymn fell into an echo behind their climbing voices.

And as they sang Indara began to crumble and slide away into the sea.

All around us the lights in the fungus above and below burst into pyreflies and swam away into the growing dusk, and the sea itself twisted into phantasmal shapes, dancers and warriors, beasts and birds, and then those shapes exploded into pyreflies too, and the water began to fall, dreamed away to some other ocean. I moved close to Auron without thinking, letting my fingers creep around the weight of his arm. I leaned on him and together we watched the world fall down, a rondo, the end of things.

And then I sang too, sang with all my heart the words of that hymn from another place.

_Pray. Your heart. Your soul. Your meat and blood and bone._

_Savior. Saver. One who saves. Well will save._

_Dream. To Dream. A Dream. Our Dream._

_Child of Prayer. Children of Prayer. The Children who stand, who will stand._

_Forever. For always._

_Bring us peace._

One door closes, my pops would say, but another opens.

At last, as it was all going still, Leviathan and Ashura whispered away into nothing, and I would have cried out then, but I could still feel his coiled serpentine weight wrapped around my brain. As the shadows fell, Auron turned away and we started the trek back to the tiled tunnel that would lead us back to the surface.

At the lip of the cave I stopped to look back.

And then I started to laugh, throwing my head back as I dug along the seams of my shorts for the places I keep those cards when I know I'll need one on the sly.

He turned back.

"What is it?" he asked, watching me skip and jump as the tangerine darkness fell around us.

"Final card," I said, as the last flickering glow of the glittering orange sea melted away and I pulled it.

Four of Hearts.

_Fa ymm kuddy ku cusatyo._

You live until you don't.

And that's all right too.

-


	12. Epilogue: Felting the Red Dog

Once upon a time there was an awesome girl named Princess Aurora. In case you haven't been keeping track, that is me. Once upon a time I pretty much thought this one guy I know was the kind of jerk who puts brass gil in gumball machines so it gets all stuck and no gumballs come out and everyone is really upset because hey, no gumballs, and he does this specifically so nobody can ever have gumballs because you know, gumballs might actually _make someone happy_. They might actually make someone enjoy their life outside of desperate and tragic monotony.

Then I thought he was the kind of guy who gives you detention just for looking at him funny, no matter what your marks are in maths, no matter if you're captain of the pep squad, because that is his idea of a good time. But then maybe I found out that he gives you detention because you _are _captain of the pep squad and he's been looking at your butt all this time he should have been teaching you differential equations or something. What are you looking at me like that for? I told you. I've read a lot of books. I didn't say they were all classics or anything, although that one I just made up pretty much is.

Once upon a time there was a man who was dead who pretended at being alive. I didn't like that so much. But then he became a man who was alive and pretended at being dead, and that I could love.

Once upon a time I met a princess and priestess and goddess fair, and her king and lord and monster husband, who knew civil law and was a guado and made a bathtub out of the sea and wore sunglasses and played the saxophone (I found out later) and liked poetry and had the eyes of a god. Their story did not end well to begin with, but then their story stopped ending so much and it was better.

Once upon a time I told you a story that you knew didn't end with 'happily ever after' because I told you it didn't, or maybe because you skipped ahead and read the ending first.

But.

Everyone, everywhere in the world has a story to be told.

Whether or not you think their story is important

or interesting

or even worth listening to at all,

it's their story and no one else's and no one can ever take that away from them.

Whether it's a good story,

or an interesting story,

or even a story with a moral --

well, that's up to them, and when all the cards are down, I don't think anyone has any room to point any fingers.

We all play the hands we're given the best we can

and maybe that makes every hand a winner more than every hand a loser.

Me, I play the cards no matter what the odds are.

My name is Rikku, and nobody's ever gonna tell me that I didn't hit the jackpot.

**The Shape of His Heart**

**Epilogue: Felting the Red Dog**

**By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )**

It was different coming up than going down, and I don't mean the pudding, which was pretty much the same going down as it was coming back up. _Ba-dum-chh._

It was different coming up than going down, because climbing those stairs out of that terrible hole was something that only took a few minutes, and not days and days and horrible, awful days. While we walked together, me chatting like a jay bird, Auron patiently listening, the both of us getting used to the fact that both Ashura and Leviathan would matter themselves at random moments when they wanted to take part in the conversation, and then dematter themselves just as suddenly, when they preferred to be inner monologue, I looked at the song-texture on the walls of that stairwell and felt the beat of the hymn like my pulse, like the water over the rocks, and I felt at home.

To be square with you, I was a little afraid even now of what it would be like when we were with everyone again. I had gotten so used to being alone with Big Red, the kind of casual comfort that had developed to fill up the spaces between the words, that I was afraid of that changing. I didn't want things to go back to being the way they had been. Too much of me had changed. To much of what I understood about him had changed. I didn't want that to be forgotten in the midst of the clamor of our Summoner's Grand Tour, when nobody was allowed to have any time to themselves or selfish wishes or hopes or wants or anything at all other than finishing the pilgrimage and defeating Sin.

I wanted him to always remember what I wanted. What I wanted. After Sin.

_After Sin._

I wanted him to remember that I was _always _wanting it, all the time, not just when we had the uncommon luxury of thinking of ourselves, not just on holiday, not just down the Aurochs's hole.

_He will never forget that_, and that was Leviathan, in my ear. _Nothing could make him forget it, not flood nor fire nor cold, cold death, now that you have said it._

Sometimes, maybe it was a little nice having him around.

Auron was our pathfinder as we hiked through the cave, and instead of leading us back to that impossible little crevice I had crammed myself and my gear through, he led us out through this very much man-sized cave maw and I felt a little silly.

As we made our way out into the snow, Ashura manifested and fluttered over to talk to me because everybody knows I am good conversation. I again expressed how impressed I was that she and Leviathan could just up and leave their temple like that, especially what with it falling apart upon their exit and all. She took it upon herself to clear things up for me.

"So you see, Rikku Cidolphus," Ashura explained patiently, after some minutes, "You are his new pillar of Fayth. This is why we could let Indara and the old statues there fall, because Leviathan has been bound to your self just as I have been bound to the self of Auron Faris."

I scratched my head, "So why didn't you just do this a long time ago? You've been lonely down there for a long time."

"We have _pride_, Rikku Cidolphus," she reminded, with the faintest edge in her voice, "And no one had ever bested us." She paused for a moment and then shook her head briefly, "And it is more than simply pride. We had to be sure of your worth. Our fates are now bound with yours. That is the price for binding with the living instead of binding with stone, which is nearly ageless. We will live until you cease to live. When you pass, the Fayth of Indara will truly be no more and Leviathan and Ashura will be gone from this world. This is now your responsibility to consider as much as it is ours, Rikku Cidolphus."

I thought about it, "So what you're saying to me is 'No more ill-advised bets without thinking about the children.' Right?"

"Don't worry about it so much," Leviathan waved me off nonchalantly, "We always win, anyway. I wouldn't spend the energy trying to plan all that out."

I raised a skeptical eyebrow, "Was he actually a _good _lawyer?"

"Better than Perry Mason," she assured, and then when I looked totally lost, she explained, "An old sphere drama that used to be a favorite in Zanarkand."

Auron spoke up then, "He was a lawyer that never lost a case." Things I didn't know about Auron number five hundred and twenty four: he used to watch old sphere dramas when he was bored and lonely.

"Trust Ol' Reliable to know about ancient sphere shows. Must be one that didn't survive," I shrugged, "Did Leviathan never lose any cases either?"

Ashura opened her mouth to say something, but Leviathan waved to cut her off.

"Never," he answered resolutely.

Auron grunted and I wondered if Ashura had let him know some additional and secret information.

_There is no secret information. I never lost a case. That's the end of it._

"Never," she chimed in after him.

I guess that's what marriage is all about: solidarity. _ Or completely covering for one another_, if you know what I mean. Why do I get the feeling that I'm going to be the one chiming in "Never!" when someone asks "So did Auron never lose any fights?" instead of vice-versa.

_Because no one would believe it the other way_, offered Leviathan helpfully.

_Hey,_ I thought, _Shut up_. And then I thought of something snappy to say, but it wasn't quite good enough, so I tried to think of something better to say --

_You know, I can tell when you're thinking lame jokes, even if you don't say them._

I wasn't prepared for that one.

Apparently, he didn't think I had quite gotten what he was getting at.

_That last one you were thinking was really bad. I wouldn't say it if I were you. People will laugh at you, and not with you._

_I wish I could punch you,_ I thought.

_You always think that will make you feel better, but it never does, does it?_

_I dunno_, I thought, _I'm willing to try again --_

Just then, on the other side of the snow bank I heard:

"I mean, what I can't figure out is how he fit through that hole. Rikku, yeah, maybe, if she hasn't been eating too much noodles and sauce -- "

"Tidus, forgive me for pointing this out, but no one eats too much of your 'noodles and sauce.'"

"Well, I'll give you that, Lulu. It pretty much is _that good_."

"You misunderstand me -- "

"WARK!"

"Hey a chocobo's not supposed to make sounds like that, ya? You sure you know how to ride it?"

"Of course I do! I mean I spent a couple hours training one once. I bet that was a happy sound it made."

"Kimahri has never heard chocobo make that sound before."

"Then I guess that proves you've never been around any happy chocobos -- "

And at that I exploded out from behind the snow bank and took Tidus off the back of that startled yellow bird with a clothesline of pure joy. We both went sprawling into the snow, me giving him noogies as he attempted to wrestle me off.

"WARK WARK WARK!" cried the chocobo, I'm sure because it was happy to see me too.

"Hey guys," said Tidus, mostly muffled by the fact I had him in a headlock, "I think I found them."

About the time I got tired of giving Tidus noogies -- which was about four seconds -- I noticed a pair of dainty feet nearby and I threw myself off of Tidus and I hugged myself some drape-y blue summoner's skirt instead.

"Yunie!" I shouted, like it was an old episode of Bevelle's 'This is your life,' and I was guessing all the mystery guests before they signed in.

"Rikku," she laughed, as she tumbled on top of me and we both landed in the deep snow, "It's good to see you too."

Tidus got himself out of the snow, and then helped Yuna out of the snow, but I guess everybody figured I was fine at fending for myself, because no one gallantly offered to help _me _out of the snow. I bet you are somehow not surprised.

I was shivering now, trembling all over like I was sitting on a metal plate that was wired with electricity and I as getting a jolt every few seconds. Whether this was because I was wearing little tiny ruffly shorts and sitting in two feet of snow or just because I was rockin' around the clock with my pure and unbridled delight at seeing everybody again -- including everyone's favorite chocobo Frances, who happened to be the big yellow bird at the end of the traces that Wakka was holding onto and trying to quiet -- is anybody's guess. Considering my past track record you might want to assume the ants-in-my-pants explanation, but let me tell you something: Big Red _didn't_. He just came sauntering over the crest of the snowbank and then skidded down the side like he was sledding on those aurochs-kicker boots of his and then before he said _anything _to _anybody _he was undoing the buckles on his coat like it was a good time for an Auron strip-tease.

This is where I hit you with _When is it not a good time for that? Thank you, thank you folks. I'll be here all week._

Before I could even think of anything snappy to say, he had shrugged out of his big red coat and then thrown it on top of me -- and notice here I said _on top of me _and not _at me_. So while I was looking like you do when you're five and decide to play 'campsite' on your bed, when you're the only tentpole of the tent that consists of your blanket, scrabbling around, flailing with my arms and legs as I struggled to _get into the coat _as opposed to _being smothered _by it, I totally missed the meaningful look Wakka gave Tidus, but I found out about it later from a reliable source. And this wasn't so much the meaningful look that says "come hither -- " so much as it was "Oooooh-kay. Judge Red just gave her his coat. There is something goin' on 'round here." Of course, you know, if Wakka and Tidus picked up on this clue, then you know everyone else in the universe had already figured it out, I guess from Big Red's body language or something. This is the part where I point out again that he does all this stuff _on purpose_, with Auron Effect(tm). Just like that he had thrown something I had been all antsy-pantsy over out in the center of the ring and then said _You wanna say something about it? Do ya? Well then, go ahead._ Here is a hint as to how this played out: _nobody said anything_. At least not then. Not to him, for sure. A little bit later that evening you bet your bottom gil that I was raked over the coals for information though. I guess that's because I don't have Auron Effect(tm).

Speaking of Auron Effect and forcing people to have the kind of impression of you that you want them to have, he wasn't finished yet.

A second passed. Then another.

Then --

Finally, he spoke, and Auron's voice rolled low and supple over all of us, and although I did not take the time to shiver, I thought about it, which probably counts for something.

"We have been on our own pilgrimage," he said, but he didn't appoligize or anything. I think maybe being Auron means never having to say you're sorry.

I had finally managed to sort myself out and into his coat, so I scrambled to my feet all at once like a long-legged-Rikku-spider wearing a red tablecloth. The only thing I could think of to do to aid in his explanation was to engage in interpretative dance, so I started to jump from one foot to the other, like I had hot coals under my toes. "It's pretty much my fault we were gone for so long but we totally found something too awesome for words so -- "

Tidus held up his hand. "What are you talking about? You've only really been gone for about two days. We weren't sending out the dogs or anything. Yuna was just worried and well, I figured I've never seen the scenic Macalania Hills so -- "

"Wait," I said, and stopped dancing to hold up my own hand, and we must have looked like a pair of goons facing off in the snow with our hands up like we were ready to play patty-cake, "That doesn't make any sense at all. I am not carrying six watches on me or anything but -- "

"No really," Tidus insisted, and we kept standing there with our hands in the air, like I was saying _talk to it_, and he was saying _no you_.

"Well," I said and thought about it. "What day is it?" I asked triumphantly, because that would settle things for sure.

He told me and I dropped my hand and slumped a little. I turned to Lulu for confirmation, because, well, _Tidus_.

"Is that really what day it is?" I asked, and she nodded and I sat down again in the snow, confounded.

_Time turns differently in the belly of the world, _said someone who wasn't me.

I screwed up my face in concentration. _What exactly do you mean? Above ground or underground, a minute is a minute, an hour is an hour, and a day is a day._

_When you are close to the hymn, many things are not as they appear to be. Time has a different way of shaping itself._

_So when did you become all fortune-cookie brilliant_, I demanded. _You sound like you ought to be standing under a waterfall or something._

_I am just trying to explain it in a way that you might be able to grasp,_ he explained cordially.

"Hey!!" I shouted, and everybody turned to look at me. I could just hear Leviathan giggling like a school girl.

Then Tidus broke in, "Hey, has anybody noticed that Rikku has been making these weird faces for a few minutes now?"

Wakka seemed a little doubtful, "Rikku's always makin' pretty weird faces, ya? Figured it was just because she was Al Bhed."

"No," answered Tidus thoughtfully, "I'm pretty sure it's more just because she's Rikku. And these were weirder faces than normal."

Trust me to completely derail Big Red's Auron Effect. I flailed around for something to distract all of them with until we could get the company properly introduced. Since I didn't think 'Hey, wanna see my tattoo?' was gonna work in this situation, the closest thing at hand was big and yellow and smelled of Gyshal Greens (and wasn't Wakka).

"So where'd you get Frances?" I asked, since it's not hard to do the math that if I hadn't been gone for too long, then Frances hadn't either.

"Him?" Tidus asked, "Oh yeah, we ran into him just a little while ago, coming pell-mell down the mountain. Little guy looked kind of lost, so we figured he was maybe your chocobo -- "

"Kweh!" interjected Frances happily.

"That's a girl chocobo, Tidus," I announced with my hands on my hips. "Can't you tell the difference? Also I am kind of mortally offended that you decided she was mine because she _looked lost_. What does that say about me?"

"That you got us lost on Bikanel Island?" Tidus tried helpfully.

"I didn't get us lost!" I cried, waving both my hands above my head irately.

"Kimahri agrees. Rikku did not get us lost," came support from an unexpected area. I felt like high-fiving that big blue Ronso just then.

I pounded one fist into my palm, "See? I totally didn't. Kimahri always calls it straight."

"However," and that was Big Red. I'm always kind of worried when he begins his statements with 'however.' I don't ever think it's mean't anything good for me. "She did not do much to get us _un_lost."

"Kimahri agrees with this also."

Oh man. Slammed by the home team. I didn't really have a snappy rejoinder for that one. But hey. Landmarks kind of move around in a rolling dune sea. Kind of like they don't in the mountains. I wasn't really counting on anyone's grasp of geography to bail me out of this one. Anyway, it was about time everybody had another laugh on me. It is one of the things I'm good for: constant frivolity. Sometimes you gotta laugh.

Fortunately, the Red Man is pretty good at setting the mood for things, even when I'm there rolling around on the canvas and making everything look like your three-year-old sister's 'watercolor painting,' and he took this moment to turn to Yuna and speak very gravely.

"Summoner Yuna, we have brought with us two who wish to speak with you."

"Very formal, Auron," laughed Ashura, and she was suddenly there, on his arm, "To be true, we wish to do more than speak with you, child."

"Whoa!" cried Tidus, because he is pretty much good at shouting things like "Whoa!" and "Totally!" and "Excellent!" "Where did that hot lady come from?"

"Zanarkand," said Leviathan, who was suddenly standing in front of me with his arms crossed, and quite between Tidus and Ashura, "She's already married." He didn't have to say it because I could hear it pretty clearly. _So step back_.

I finally took my cue, before Tidus could roll out the chestnut "Hey, you're a guado!" because when the cards are down? _I've got some showmanship._

"Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, may I present the Fayth of Indara, Temple of the Summoned Sea, all the way from the Magic City Zanarkand, the City that Never Sleeps: Ashura, the All Holy," I waved with a bombastic flourish, "And Leviathan, the Lord of all Waters."

And then the hymn rippled out from us, Auron, Ashura, Leviathan, and me, like we'd been holding our breath, and it swallowed them up.

I don't think I really have to tell you this, but the crowd? _It went wild._

The next few minutes were a tangle of examination and hand-shaking and admiration and just general chaos, but I know Leviathan at least enjoyed it, because when does he _not _enjoy attention? Finally, everyone had met everyone else, and I had repeated the basic gist of the story about three different times in three different ways to various and sundry persons, adding my own embellishments and sound effects as I went along.

"Wait, wait," said Tidus, in the middle of my first revision, "Let me get this straight. You went through all that and you still didn't win your leg back?"

"Well," I said, putting my hands on my hips, "That's a complicated question without a clear sort of answer -- "

"No," interjected Auron levelly, "She did not."

And then Tidus laughed at me, but you can't really blame him because he fell on his head a lot as a baby and can't help it.

So I kept on giving my spangled retellings and I was just in the middle of a good one, all "So then I pretty much shot out his eye, and all this horrible nasty pink goo came out everywhere -- " when tall, dark, and sinister grabbed the back of my collar -- or really, grabbed the back of his collar that I was wearing -- and dragged me back behind him, which I took as my cue to hold the rest of my amazing story-telling until it was a little more appropriate. With me yanked off center stage, Leviathan and Ashura occupied it with both grace and majesty, because when that goldfish-snake wants it? _He's got it._

Leviathan gave me a long look, then turned to Yuna and bowed to her deeply and graciously, sweeping one long-fingered hand in front of himself.

"Enchanted," he said to her.

Yuna clasped her hands to her chest and bowed back, "You have my gratitude, Master Leviathan, and all my thanks for agreeing to walk this difficult way with us."

"I am honored to pact with someone who would change the world," he answered, and I started to get worried it was all just going to devolve into a mutual admiration society, but he just moved close to her and then something _magic _happened -- the air around Yuna all heavy and blurry with pyreflies as Leviathan touched her and her body seemed to draw him in with an aquamarine pulse. It only took a moment, that touch of grace, but after it was over I somehow knew that Yuna had received the fayth. Leviathan stepped backward to let Ashura join with Yuna, and as he did he looked at me over his shoulder, just one eye like a shark, and _so smug._

_Why aren't you ever nice like that to me? _I demanded.

_Don't be incestuous, fry_, came his long-suffering reply.

To my credit, I did not shout "I am not being incestuous!!" (with three exclamation points, no less), causing everyone present to stop what they were doing and then look at me very sadly and carefully, although it was a pretty near thing, so I'm not really sure how much credit I actually deserve there.

"Hey," observed Tidus, "Rikku's making those weird faces again."

Nobody really paid attention to him this time. I am not sure if I should count that as a success or not, considering everyone else was watching Yuna receive the fayth.

"I have faith in your resolve, Yuna Braska," said Ashura after it was done and she fluttered over to stand behind her husband. "And be sure that it will take both faith and resolve to change this world."

"Not just that," I broke in, and everyone turned to look at me again, like I was covered in bees. "Not just that," I repeated, and looked at all of them, clustered there around the chocobo.

"It takes _friends_," I said.

"It takes those that go on," said Auron, suddenly behind me, and I knew _he _was in my corner, because maybe I'd finally earned that. "And those that stay."

And then Yuna smiled at me, and I _knew _that she _knew_.

"It takes family," she said.

"It takes _everybody_," said Tidus as he put his hand on Yuna's shoulder, because maybe he can be pretty smart when it counts.

"Alone," Ashura quoted like the wisest of the wise, "One man may shift the world. Together, it becomes inevitable that we do so."

_Ev oui lyh'd rumt uh du cusadrehk, oui sekrd yc famm tea frana oui cmaab._

And no, that's not something my pops says.

It's something _I_ say.

_Live on, and fight your sorrow._

Maybe it took grinding us both into the dirt, grinding us both into each other to really understand what that meant.

And after all that spit and grit and dirt and filth and vomit and sweat and blood and hurt I felt it in my bones, writ there in ink as indelible as whatever it is that makes up my soul.

_Never. _

_Give. _

_Up._

-

So that's the story of how I changed the world (somewhat) got a dead boyfriend (kind of) and a lawyer in my brain (unfortunately).

But, just so you know? That's really not the end of my story.

What did I tell you?

Stories? The good kind?

They never end.

Mine's never gonna.

Once upon a time I changed the world _some more._

But that's another story.

_Lydlr oui uh dra vmebceta._

We'll see you then.

-

**Part the First: Liner Notes**

Battle Strategy

_**Leviathan**_

For this fight, Rikku is equipped with a Cerulean Targe with the effect Watereater. She also equips Deus Ex Machina, a claw with all four elemental strikes. Auron equips the Thunderblade with the effect Lightningstrike. His bracer, Rikku tells us, is already pretty good. Pretend it has whatever favorite effects you like.

The first turn is taken by Leviathan, who assumes his Aeon form. He immediately begins 'gathering water,' like all Leviathans we know and love. You can consider this like a countdown to overdrive, rather like Bahamut's (although I am sure Leviathan will tell you he thought of it first.) The next two moves are Rikku's. She uses Chocobo Feather both times to cast haste first on herself and then on Auron. Leviathan continues to hang, building up a wave, and Auron dashes off to strike him. On her next turn Rikku doublecasts Thundaga. Auron is up close, hitting Leviathan. Rikku doublecasts Thundaga again and then takes the trigger command 'Shoot.' They continue this way, with Rikku taking turns to take a mana tablet and then ethers when her MP is low, until Leviathan succeeds in filling up his overdrive bar and then uses his overdrive 'Tsunami' which changes the battle environment from ground-based to underwater. Rikku eats the damage as her targe has the Watereater ability, but now Auron is a liability as he cannot fight underwater. Rikku takes three turns where she doublecasts Thundaga, but as Auron is now effectively KO'd, Leviathan turns his attention to her and having found that she eats his water attacks, resorts to physical ones. Rikku continues to alternate between doublecasting Thundaga and slugging potions, but she cannot keep up with the damage he's doing particularly because at the moment she's fighting him solo.

Here's the kicker. She casts Float, a spell that's not on the spheregrid, and this spell has the effect of returning the battle to effectively ground-based, as she and Auron can now tread safely on the water. Rikku has more or less killed herself by casting this spell. Fortunately Auron has an overdrive stored up and uses Tornado to finish Leviathan off. The audience is distressed because it looks like our heroine is done for! Auron wants to dump some elixir on her, but we are told that won't work! Never fear, Ashura casts Curaja which can pretty much fix everything. The day is saved. Our intrepid party of two has successfully defeated Leviathan. You get 'Proof of Lawyer' or something.

_**Ashura**_

For this fight, Auron is equipped with his katana Muramasa, which carries the inherent abilities Triple Overdrive, Triple AP, Overdrive-AP. He gets a lot of sphere levels when he's done with this fight! Both he and Rikku have their overdrive mode set to stoic since Ashura's All Holy overdrive _hurts a lot._ He comes into this fight with a partially full overdrive meter and Rikku comes in with a full one. This is important for their strategy!

Ashura takes the first turn to assume her Aeon form. Rikku takes the next turn to user a Chocobo Feather on Auron which puts him in haste status. Then Ashura switches forms and uses her special attack 'grab' to seize Rikku. Rikku is effected by status effect Mortal Terror! Yikes! Auron attacks, causing Ashura to drop Rikku. He uses remedy on her to clear her status and then attacks again. Ashura shifts forms again and casts Curaja on herself, healing herself a jillion points. Crap. Rikku finally manages to haste herself by using Chocobo Feather and then uses a Star Curtain to cast reflect on Ashura. Ashura shifts forms yet again and casts dispel, because she ain't stupid. Now Rikku finally takes her Overdrive and mixes Dark Matter and Lightning Marble for Trio of 9999. From now on, both Rikku and Auron will be doing 9999 damage each time they hit. Ashura shifts back to scary sword lady. Auron must have high evade, because he goes on to avoid or parry most of Ashura's strikes while he makes his attacks count. Rikku uses Star Curtain again and this time Ashura does not notice she has been put into reflect status. Rikku also steals at this point. Auron is in Guard mode and takes a hit for Rikku, and then Rikku uses Elixir on him, presumably the one he tried to use on her earlier. They each do a number of physical attacks for a while, until Ashura is driven into Overdrive. Rikku uses Lunar Curtain on both herself and Auron, putting them in Shell status, and this keeps them alive, although in critical status, during her powerful overdrive All Holy. After her overdrive she casts Curaja on herself again, but it reflects off and cures the opposing party instead. Auron gets to his feet and uses the special command Entrust to hand off what's remaining of his overdrive meter. This puts Rikku in overdrive again and she Mixes Ice Gem and Dark Matter for Supernova.

This finishes Ashura and she congratulates the two of them by casting another Curaja, this time out of the battle environment. You get spoils of battle, hurrah!

The World According to Cid

or

_Things my Pops is Always Saying_

_**Prologue:**_

Ajano zuinhao cdyndc fedr dra vencd cdab, yht ajano tyo pakehc fedr dra vencd nyo uv mekrd.

Every journey starts with the first step, and every day begins with the first ray of light.

Ed'c dra meddma drehkc dryd kad oui.

It's the little things that get you. -- Or, as Rikku puts it: The devil's in the details.

Hajan keja ib.

Never give up. Pops always says she never knows when to quit.

Rumt ouin duhkia, Rikku.

Hold your tongue, Rikku. Here's one from Brother. I somehow think he's probably always saying this to her. It's the Al Bhed equivalent of STFU.

Cammehk ouin haekrpun'c lrelgah ec paddan dryh cammehk ouin ufh.

Selling your neighbor's chicken is better than selling your own. Words to live by.

_**Chapter Three:**_

Fecrehk fuh'd dinh dra cgo knaah.

Wishing won't turn the sky green.

_**Chapter Five:**_

Ed'c dra meddma drehkc dryd kad oui.

It's the little things that get you. Again. It's always the little things that seem to get her.

Cred.

Shit. Naturally. Pardon her language.

_**Chapter Six:**_

Oui meja dra pacd oui lyh.

You live the best you can. In Rikku's words: you play the hand you're dealt.

_**Chapter Eight:**_

Rikku, pa bnybynat.

Rikku, be prepared. This is the motto of the boy scouts, which confirms Rikku's suspiscions that it is just something he heard some kids repeating.

_**Chapter Nine:**_

Cbudmacc, Rikku. Fa sicd taveha aqlammahla ev fa yna kuehk du lrynka vun ed.

Spotless, Rikku. We must define excellence if we are going to charge for it. And here's one from our favorite Al Bhed entrepenuer, Rin, whom Rikku calls Rin-pucc, that is, Rin-boss.

Ev ed'c fundr tueh', ed'c cyjuneh'

If it's worth doin', it's savorin' -- More words to live by, especially if you are undressing an underage girl! It's a good thing Spira has no age of consent laws!

Uhmo po vymmehk tu fa maynh du kad ib.

Only by falling do we learn to get up. This applies to faith, but also a whole lot of other things. Try saying it when anything crappy happens. People will think you're really wise!

_**Chapter Ten:**_

Syho ryhtc syga mekrd fung

Many hands make light work. This is another boy scoutism. I think everything wise Cid says he really stole from the boy scouts.

Ed yeh'd dra fyo dra funmt'c syta

It ain't the way the world's made. In the sense that Rikku is using it here: the sun doesn't shine on the same dog's ass every day, but it sure is likely to shine on it some of the time.

Huputo ajan vuiht y haf luihdno fedruid mucehk cekrd uv dra cruna.

Nobody ever found a new country without losing sight of the shore.

Fa ymm kuddy ku cusatyo.

We all gotta go someday. Or, as Rikku puts it, you live until you don't, and that's all right too.

Play to Win

Poker Terminology in Shape

_**Gimme the Odds**_

The title of the prologue. The odds here are naturally the odds to beat. This one's pretty simple. Outside of bluffing, poker's really just a game of probability. Each of the winning hands has a certain odds of coming up. Of course, poker's not just about probability. Every hand's a winner, just like every hand's a loser. Rikku could've won this game with just a high card. As you know, she does not. Although she's playing a good hand here: three of a kind, queens no less, Auron has four of a kind, even if they're deuces. The odds here are in her favor. She knows she has three of a kind Queens and he's only showing two of a kind deuces. She's playing the favorite. But she still loses. One thing to remember is to never count too closely on the odds. Sometimes they're only good for pissing you off.

_**Follow the Queen**_

Follow the Queen is a seven card stud wild card game. Whenever a queen card is dealt face up, the next card that's dealt will detemine the wild cards. For example, the Queen of Spades is dealt face up. Next comes the Three of Clubs. Threes are wild until another Queen comes face up, when they are no longer wild and instead the next card following the Queen will be wild. Wild card games are always fun and somewhat more unpredicatble, particularly since the wild card can change in the middle of a hand. Here we can assume Rikku is the Queen card. If Auron turns up next, which he does, that means he's wild. _Well_.

_**Under the Blue Chip**_

This is an old-fashioned way of saying things. In games where red, white, and blue tokens are used, a blue token, that is, the blue chip, is the one with the highest value, therefore, blue chip generally means something that's worth having. Nowadays, it's more common to hear someone actually talking poker using the phrase "black chip," since a black is worth a hundred dollars. When players use chip declaration in a split-pot game, revealing a hand with a blue chip (or any chip, actually) declares an intent to play high hand. In this case, they don't have control of the blue chip, they are in fact _under _it. It's something worth having, but it's something that's crushing them.

_**Being the Kicker to Hold**_

In a hand of poker, a kicker is a side card, one that doesn't go into determining the value of the hand, but one that can be used to break a tie between two hands of equal value. For instance, a hand A-A-3-J-6, the 3, J, and 6, are kickers. This hand has a pair of aces. It will beat any other hands with pairs or lower hands, except another pair of aces. If this hand goes up against the hand A-A-4-7-Q, the second hand will win, because the kicker card Q is higher than the kicker J. In draw poker, a kicker can sometimes be held in an attempt to pull another card to match it, thus building a stronger hand, instead of discarding everything that doesn't match. Here Rikku is trying to be the Kicker to Hold, that is the card that doesn't match and yet isn't discarded, that may turn out to win the hand anyway.

_**Building our Big Cat Flush**_

A Big Cat Flush is a non-standard poker hand. A Big Cat is a no-pair hand defined by the highest and lowest cards, that is high card K, low card 8. (For example, K-Q-J-10-8). Commonly it ranks above all other cat and dog hands, as well as over a straight, being beaten only by a straight flush. Some house rules make it the highest hand in poker, under the logic that both Little Cat and Little Dog top regular straights, so it makes sense for Big Cat to top straight flush. Here Rikku is trying her best to build a hand that'll beat any other hands.

_**Bluffs Called, Antes Forced**_

To Call in poker is to see their bet or raise. To call a bluff means that you see through a bluff, or are otherwise sure of your hand and raise or see the bet no matter what the other player wants you to think he's holding. To ante is to put your money where your mouth is. In this case a bluff is called and the player is forced to either ante or fold. Even if Auron folds here, Rikku chooses to ante, as we shall see.

_**The Burn Card in my Pocket**_

A burn card is a card dealt off the top of the deck and discarded before each round of play. This is done so that players who might have been able to read the card during the previous round will have less of an advantage over those who could not. This card is effectively "burned" from play. It will not enter play this round. While it is still a little useful to know what the burn card is, it is not nearly so advantageous as knowing what one of the cards in play is. Of course, we know from experience that Rikku cheats. Any card that's burned from the deck will end up in her pocket when no one's paying attention, to be used for her benefit at a later date. Consider this her ace in the hole, or rather, the ace up her sleeve.

_**Drawing Dead Against the House**_

To draw dead is to draw to complete a hand even when the hand will lose no matter what is drawn. For example, drawing a card to complete a straight when an opponent has a straight flush already completed. In this circumstance drawing to complete your hand is futile because it will always be beaten by the higher hand. Generally, drawing dead is only realized after the hands have been shown. In this case, I think the analogy is pretty clear.

_**Killing the Chernobyl Cowboy**_

Chernobyl Cowboy is a seven card stud game, like Follow the Queen, only Chernobyl Cowboy is a kill card game rather than a wild card game. The Chernobyl Cowboy is the King of Hearts. Whenever this card appears face up, the round is dead. Then everyone antes and begins a new round, until the Chernobyl Cowboy appears again, and kills that round. Anyone who folds during the course of the hand is out until the end of the game. The Chernobyl Cowboy here is Leviathan, the King of Hearts. Their challenge is to kill the kill card before he kills the game.

_**Two of a Kind and Working**_

The title of this chapter refers to the ridiculously cheesy country song whose full title is "Two of a Kind, Working on a Full House." Alas, even I have weaknesses, and one of my weaknesses is to awful country songs about playing poker. Or using poker euphemisms. If you ever want a good time go look up the lyrics or listen to the song and try to place our intrepid heroes in the roles as prescribed. It will net you ten endless years of entertainment. If you are not getting this title then I think you need someone to explain puns to you.

_**Showdown: All in, Cards Speak**_

If the final betting round in a game of poker closes and there is more than one player left, these players then enter the showdown. During the showdown the remaining players show their hands to determine the winner(s). To claim a part (or all) of the pot, a player must show all of the cards he or she has, whether they were played in the final hand or not. Cards speak during a showdown -- that is, even if a player mistakes the value of his hand either accidentally or purposefully, it is the actual value of the cards that stands, not what he or she calls as his hand. All in denotes that the player has put all of their remaining chips in on the last betting round. At last the only players left are Ashura and Auron and Rikku. The last betting round has ended and this is their final showdown.

_**Felting the Red Dog**_

Red Dog is just another poker variant, but here I'm using it as a stand-in for someone else we know who is big and red and kind of a dog. To felt someone, in common poker parlance, is to clean them out so bad that instead of chips all they've got in front of them is a piece of felt -- that is, the table. I almost wish I was making this up, but alas, it is true.

**Part the Second: Author's Notes**

Well, what a long, strange trip it's been. When I started writing Shape in golden ages past I had never written anything of length for a Final Fantasy fandom. Oh, don't get me wrong. The wheels in my head are always turning, but generally I keep their turning to myself -- that is, I draw stupid, gunky fanart and spend my time telling people who'll listen to me "what really happened." In the beginning I was playing FF7 with intentions to write something for Yuffie and Vincent, but then like Rikku I took an ill-advised bet -- that I could write for a fandom that other Final Fantasy fandoms like to make fun of for being kind of the slow kid in class who never gets picked for blitzball, that I could go into it with no rabid personal convictions one way or another and make some magic.

Four years later, well beat the drums and hold the phone, the sun came out today. It's finished, and I'm proud of this misbegotten child one way or another.

My pops always says, _E'ja kud vyedr uv dra raynd. E's kuehk frana so raynd femm dyga sa. E'ja kud vyedr du pameaja E lyh tu yhodrehk._ Or wait. Maybe it's Rod Stewart that says that. I forget.

When I started, I had a clear picture of where I was going and more or less how I wanted to get there. Writing Shape has ever been a pleasure. It is neither difficult nor complicated. I write what I feel and what I think and out comes Shape in manageable pieces. Anyone who has seen me in action knows that I go about my business in two modes: A) research and B) development. In my research phase I immerse myself in whatever it is I plan to be writing about. I eat, sleep, and breathe my subject, become the foremost expert on just about everything pertaining to it. I play it forward. I play it backward. I play it to the bone. Then after I have wallowed in it for some indeterminate period of time I sit down and write. I write as I have always written: on the fly and at a stretch. I write each chapter of Shape all out of order as I get down the scene that needs to be gotten down, and then stitch them together into the shape you end up with. Then I go back through and edit it for sound and flavor and well, _sense-making_ because sometimes I get carried away and forget Shape is supposed to be fun and easy and write it a little too much like Finnegan's Wake or The Waves.

I have sometimes thought it would be awesometimes fun to go to a Con and preform a live reading of Shape. I think I'd have a good time doing it. Shape is a story that's meant to be read aloud. Next time you want to reread it, corral one of your unlucky and white-eyed friends and tie them to a chair and perform a reading for them. Nothing is quite like hearing somebody say "Maester Kinoc on a tricycle" and really mean it.

So a lot of things have changed since I began Shape, a lot of things in my personal life and my public one. But through trial and hardships I find that the French have a way of saying it that really comes to the heart of it. _Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose._ Trust the French. They have a saying for everything. I know you've heard that one before, but maybe it takes living it a few times before it really _means _to you. I write for a living, but then everybody knows that. I've struggled in the past with whether I should continue to write Shape because when I write Shape I'm not writing my other projects, maybe the ones that people outside internet lands respect more, maybe the ones that may someday help me pay my grocery bill. In the end I decided that I'll damn well write whatever I want whenever I want. I value the freedom to work on what I want to work on, and if the thing I want to work on at the moment happens to be something for Shape or for FF fandom, then that's what I'm going to work on.

So I guess what I'm here to say is: this ain't the end, if for some reason you were hopin' it was. When I started Shape I intended it as a stage-setter. It does nothing more but put the pieces in place for the story I really wanted to write when I started. So if you feel like there are things left unfinished by the end of Shape, that's because there are. There are supposed to be. This is by no means the end. If you're upset because you've been waiting forever for closure, then be my guest and make up whatever closure you want. I think one of the pleasures of fandom is seeing what it is that people do with your work once it's out there. If you're ready for more, then great, we're both on the same page.

And remember, it ain't over even when the fat lady tells you it's over, _in song._

Otherwise, people reading Shape with an ear for Final Fantasy will find that there are bizarre references crammed into every corner. If you think it's a reference from Final Fantasy Tactics? It is. Considering who our supporting cast is, there are several references to FFIV. I also throw in references to FFVII, VIII, and IX whenever possible, because I am just kind of like that. Leviathan has ever been my favorite summon in any game, across fantasies. I was sorely disappointed when he was not in FFX. But then, my loss was your gain, right? Now I spend most of my time pretending he actually is in FFX because that suits me.

Here at the end, there are some things I need to go back and change for consistency. Just little things ultimately, to make it mesh more with my understanding of FFX and the backstory of Spira as it stands now. I'm sure you can pick them all out, if you want to be picky, and I know I'll get around to fixing them, along with the terror has wrought upon the formatting of the earlier chapters by declaring war on anything that isn't an alphanumeric. I imagine they'll start outlawing extraneous punctuation next. Changes from the beauteous good old days aside, I'll keep posting my work here since this seems to be the best place to get it to as many people as possible.

Remember that I write primarily for all of you. I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who has ever read Shape, everyone who has ever reviewed it, everyone who has ever recced it anywhere, or just told their friends about it. Thank you. I really appreciate it. All of you make my heart full. Shape started as a little story that no one much cared about, written on a bet, written for giggles, and maybe it changed into something that made a lot of people happy, or maybe just made a lot of people roll around laughing. If it did, that makes me happy. If it did, you should be proud because you had a hand in making it the way it is too. Please continue to let me know what you think about this story whenever you cross paths with it again. Every note someone leaves for me is another drop in my bucket of happiness.

If you do like my stuff enough that you think you'd like to read my original fiction, then please get in touch with me through the magic of email and I'll arrange for it. I'd be more than happy to share it and I'd like to think that some of you might enjoy it. Hey, it has a stoic guy in a red coat. _I am just guessing here._

In other words, hold my hand. In other words, darling kiss me.

It's been a great ride guys, and I hope it keeps going for a good long while.

Catch you on the flipside,

Gabi

**AURON FARIS, 007**

**and**

**RIKKU J. CIDOLPHUS  
WILL RETURN.**

What did Rikku steal from Ashura? _I bet you want to know._


End file.
